Jason Coombs

Curriculum Vitae

Contact Info:

Email: jcoombs@cns.umass.edu

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

Phone: (413) 545-0357

Title:

Research Assistant

Education:

B.S. Lock Haven University 1994-1998
Major: Cellular and Organismal Biology Minor: Chemistry

M.S. Clarion University 2000-2002
Thesis: "Population structure of brook trout living in adjacent headwater tributaries as revealed by mtDNA analysis"

Ph.D University of Massachusetts 2002-Present
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 temporily 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., Letcher, B.H., and Nislow, K.H. “CREATE: Software to create input files from diploid genotypic data for 52 genetic software programs”. Submitted to Molecular Ecology Notes.

Letcher, B.H., Nislow, K.H., and Coombs, J.A. “Population response to habitat fragmentation in a stream-dwelling brook trout population”. Submitted to PLoS Biology.

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