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Jason Coombs (CV)

Contact Info:
U.S. Forest Service
201 Holdsworth Hall
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003

Email: jcoombs@cns.umass.edu
Phone: (413) 545-0357

Title:
Research Assistant

Education:
1998 - B.S. Lock Haven University, Major: Cellular and Organismal Biology Minor: Chemistry

2002- M.S. Clarion University, Thesis: "Population structure of brook trout living in adjacent headwater tributaries as revealed by mtDNA analysis"

2002-Present - Ph.D University of Massachusetts, Dissertation: "Reproduction in the wild: Linking individual life history strategies to lifetime reproductive success"

Proposal

Research Interests:
I am interested in how individual life-history strategies on an ecological time scale influence population level processes evolutionarily. Currently my research is focused on the long-term monitoring of a naturally reproducing brook trout (Salvelinus fontinalis) population. The study involves areas of population biology, molecular ecology, and evolutionary ecology to temporally monitor individual traits, reconstruct a population pedigree, and estimate heritability of, and selection for traits involved in differing life history strategies.

Additionally I enjoy developing software programs to facilitate scientific study. One program entitled 'CREATE' is designed to manipulate raw diploid genetic data into correctly formatted input files for over fifty other genetic software analysis programs. Another program entitled 'SpawnOpt' is specifically designed for the USFWS Maine Atlantic salmon hatchery program for real-time mating optimization designed to maximize genetic variation of crosses. Currently another program is in design to simulate known population pedigrees allowing for mating strategy, survival functions, capture probabilities, and mutation and genotyping error.

Publications:
Coombs, J. A., B. H. Letcher and K. H. Nislow. 2008. CREATE: a software to create input files from diploid genotypic data for 52 genetic software programs. Molecular Ecology Resources 8: 578-580.

Letcher BH, Nislow KH, Coombs JA, O’Donnell MJ, Dubreuil TL. 2007. Population Response to Habitat Fragmentation in a Stream-Dwelling Brook Trout Population. PLoS ONE 2(11): e1139. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001139