Faye Romero

As a PhD candidate in Nancy Chen’s lab at the University of Rochester, I’m interested in using population genomics to better understand how inbreeding impacts the fitness of small, threatened populations. Specifically, I’m investigating the genetics of inbreeding depression in the Federally Threatened Florida Scrub-Jay.

• How does inbreeding manifest in the genome across individuals and over time?
• What regions of the genome contribute to negative fitness outcomes (and ultimately, population decline) over short timescales? What role does deleterious variation play?
• How can gene flow mitigate (or exacerbate) the effects of inbreeding depression at the genetic level? How can we use this knowledge to inform conservation management practices?

During my undergraduate at UC Berkeley in Noah Whiteman’s lab, I used museum specimens from the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology to explore how the morphology of Anna’s Hummingbirds has responded to decades of anthropogenic environmental changes, such as the introduction of hummingbird feeders.