Principal Investigator
Dr. Hans C.E. Larsson
Postdocs & Graduate Students
Negar Tajik (PhD)
I’m a PhD student focusing on embryology and evolution. I hold a Bachelor’s degree in Microbiology and am pursuing a direct PhD. My work primarily involves studying the development of digits in chick embryos, using them as a model to understand how evolutionary processes shape their formation.
Easton Houle (MSc)
Co-supervised by Graham A.C. Bell FRS and Professor Andrew P. Hendry, I am writing a Master’s thesis of Science on a new model system for the study of cultural evolution: Hebrew Cantillation.
In biological development, there is a structural division between gene-inheritance and gene-expression, allowing for a relatively small number of genes to produce a complex and dynamic phenotype; in principle, this divide between genotype and phenotype facilitates the study of biological inheritance.
Hebrew Cantillation has such a structural division between expression and inheritance: what is inherited is not the immensely complex melody heard in the context of performance (reciting a given biblical text), but a small set of elementary melodic cells that are each recalled from memory as needed, translated, and spliced together across the words over which they are invoked. The prompts that invoke them are the ṭa`amei ha-miqra, lit. ‘the senses of the reading’, a prosodic orthography seen by some as a kind of accent-punctuation. These 28 signs occur across the manuscripts of every population, thus the melodic cells invoked by them can be modeled as homologous memes between every population.
Along with some geometric morphometrics, I am using discrete character scoring, cladistic searches by maximum parsimony, and historical knowledge of Israelite and Jewish migrations, to show that it is possible to use cladistic methods to model an historically unseen evolutionary history behind the world’s many recitation traditions.
Louis-Philippe Bateman (MSc)
I am an MSc student broadly interested in the applications of paleontology in ecology and conservation. During my undergrad, I had the chance to partake in many small research projects about biogeography, functional morphology, and ecology. I seek to reunite these for my master’s by studying tetrapod community structure over the last 66 million years in North America. Outside of the lab, you can find me bouldering, debating, and learning languages—sometimes all at the same time. [louis-philippe.bateman at mail.mcgill.ca] [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Louis-Philippe-Bateman]
Andre Mueller (MSc)
I am a Master’s student interested in Cretaceous insect biodiversity, extinction and environmental interactions. My previous research focuses primarily on the description of new Canadian insect species, paleoclimate estimates using fossil plants, and dinosaur fossil preparation. [andre.mueller@maill.mcgill.ca [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Andre-Mueller-30]
Undergraduate Students
Kate Birch
Kristy Sanchez Vega
Mac Devereux
Former Students
Post Doctoral Students
Jose Avila Cervantes
Emily Standen
Graduate Students
Anthony Smith
Dirley Cortés Parra
Alexandre Demers-Potvin
Hoai-Nam Bui
Jose Avila Cervantes
Louise-Marie Meunier
Trina Du
Emily Bamforth
Thomas Alexander Dececchi
Edwin Arce Correa
Luke Harrison
Rui Tahara
Audrey Heppleston
Maria de Boef
Matthew Vavrek
Erin Maxwell
Nadia Fröbisch
Undergraduate Students
Alex Anderson
Sofia Staley
Phoebe Leung
Siwen Ding
Larsson lab 