Curtis Robert Young
Harvard University
Dept. of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
16 Divinity Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
email: cyoung (at) oeb.harvard.edu
tel (cell): 831-325-7034

My research focuses on ecological and evolutionary processes operating at the population and species level, and has three major areas of emphasis:

1. Empirical studies aimed at understanding larval dispersal and host-symbiont interactions in globally distributed hydrothermal vent taxa. This work has led to the study of how geological and ocean transport processes (i.e., extinction and recolonization and bathymetrically-driven deep ocean circulation) affect diversity in these environments.
2. Developing statistical tools to answer ecological and evolutionary questions that arise in my empirical research.
3. Developing ecological theory that identifies important biological processes (e.g., mating behavior) that might interact with policy decisions in the management of natural populations. This work has been applied to the Sealous Game Reserve in Tanzania.

These foci require a multidisciplinary scientific approach that combines empirical, statistical and theoretical pursuits that bridge the fields of genetics, population biology, behavior, benthic ecology, microbiology, physical oceanography, and geology. My deep-sea field work has been conducted during 17 research cruises to explore seeps or hydrothermal vents and seeps in areas such as Monterey Bay, Juan de Fuca/Gorda Ridges, East Pacific Rise, Pacific-Antarctic Ridge, Fiji/Lau Basin, and the Central Indian Ridge. Many of these cruises were either on WHOI's research vessel the R/V Atlantis (the mothership of the DSV Alvin), MBARI's vessel, the R/V Western Flyer (the mothership of the ROV Tiburon) or the R/V Knorr / R/V Melville (using the ROV Jason). To see a few pictures of my travels, visit the 9N Alvin 2000 or Indian Ocean 2001 pages. A complete list of the research cruises that I have participated in can be found in my c.v..

In the Cavanaugh lab: I am studying the genetic population structure of symbionts associated with deep-sea hydrothermal vent mussels of the genus Bathymodiolus. I have also been involved in phylogenetic studies of the symbionts associated with hydrothermal vent and cold seep vesicomyid clams. These empirical studies are augmented with the application of a novel model choice statistic used to test phylogenetic hypotheses and the development of a Bayesian estimator of nuclear-dicytoplasmic covariances.

MCMC course: I taught a half-day workshop on Markov Cain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods applied to population genetics at MBARI in 2006 that included such topics as Markov chains, MCMC convergence diagnostics, MCMC algorithm tuning, and hypothesis testing. The course received very good reviews at all levels (graduate students through senior research scientists) from institutions including MBARI, UCSC, Stanford, and Berkeley. The concepts covered in the workshop are general, and can be applied to any MCMC approaches. I conducted a similar workshop in 2009 at Ewha Wommans University in Seoul, Korea that was attended by 59 participants from 14 institutions. This workshop included a lab devoted to assessing MCMC convergence form output generated by MrBayes. If you are interested in such a course or a derivation of it, please contact me. Notes from these courses and supporting material (e.g., R scripts, example data, etc.) can be found on the MCMC workshop page.

2008 JGI User Meeting: Genomics of Energy & Environment: This international gathering of researchers with an interest in sequence-based science will offer three days of user presentations, tours, workshops, and poster sessions. This year's meeting will specifically emphasize the genomics of renewable energy strategies, biomass conversion to biofuels, environmental gene discovery, and engineering of fuel-producing organisms. A series of presentations by leading scientists advancing these topics will feature a keynote address by Berkeley Lab Director and Nobelist Steve Chu.

American Society for Microbiology: 108th General Meeting

Evolution 2008

Workshop on the Taxonomy and Phylogeny of Vesicomyid and Mytilid Bivalves
Initiated by ChEss, a field project of the Census of Marine Life

July 13

Ewha Womans University
MCMC Convergence Workshop in Evolutionary Biology, Instructor

California Dreaming