Dr. Mel Zarate

Mel Zarate teaches General Biology II. Dr. Zarate’s research lies on the intersection of evolutionary biology, conservation genetics, and landscape ecology, with a particular focus on understanding the evolutionary histories and management needs of threatened species. Her research integrates genomic data with information about historical and human-altered landscapes to investigate how environmental change has shaped patterns of population connectivity, divergence, adaptation, and species diversification through time. She is particularly interested in how past landscape changes can provide insight into the processes that generated present-day patterns of genetic diversity and how ongoing anthropogenic disturbance may alter those patterns in the future. Her work also incorporates environmental variables into habitat suitability and species distribution models to identify the ecological factors that shape species distributions and assess how suitable habitat may change under future environmental conditions. Much of her research focuses on wild endangered primates, using these complementary genetic and ecological approaches to better understand their evolutionary history, vulnerability to habitat change, and potential responses to future environmental pressures. In addition to wild populations, she has also studies population genetics of primates in zoos.