I completed my undergraduate degree in Biology at the University of Ottawa in 2009 for my thesis on characterizing patterns of diversification following mass extinction events of the bacterium, Pseudomonas fluorescens in spatially heterogeneous environments.  I began my Masters here at the University of Western Ontario in January, 2010.  I plan on studying artificial selection in Drosophila melanogaster.  It has long been the fundamental goal amongst ecologists and evolutionists to determine distribution and relative abundance patterns of species.  In particular, I intend to look at the effect that migration has on the adaptation to desiccation stress in a laboratory setting keeping in mind that most insects are challenged by this stressor given their large SA:V ratio.  Using Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism to model these relationships is ideal given that they can easily be manipulated and they have short generation times.  This is important because I will need large population sizes to perform my selection experiments with varying levels of migration rates.  Overall, this will allow me to better understand what happens at range edges, where typically an abiotic gradient creates differentiated core and peripheral populations where selection regimes differ.