People

Principal Investigator

Diana Rennison

Diana is an Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of California San Diego. She joined the faculty in 2019. Diana completed her M.Sc. at the University of Victoria in 2010, where she worked on opsin gene duplication and divergence in Poeciliid fish. In 2016 she completed her Ph.D at the University of British Columbia, where she studied the genetic basis of adaptation in the threespine stickleback to predation and other sources of divergent selection. For her postdoctoral work she took up a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship at the University of Bern; during this time Diana studied parallel genomic differentiation and genetic sources of evolutionary constraint.

Diana’s CV and Google Scholar profile.

Postdoctoral Fellows

Matthew Farnitano

Matt joined the lab as a PostDoc in May of 2025. Details of his research are coming soon.

Zachary Tobias

Zac joined the lab as a PostDoc in May of 2024. He completed his MSc in 2016 at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, where he researched the comparative phylogeography of two host-parasite systems. He completed his PhD in 2024 in the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program. There he primarily researched the genomics and ecophysiology of thermal adaptation in the invasive golden star tunicate, Botryllus schlosseri. In the Rennison Lab, Zac is pursuing projects on evolutionary parallelism in the threespine stickleback. Particularly, he is interested in understanding what factors promote or constrain parallelism and how parallelism scales across levels of biological organization.

Graduate Students

David Ferranti

David joined the lab as a Ph.D. student in the fall of 2021.  He previously studied marine invertebrate phylogeography and green algae phylogenetics.  David is interested in the importance of standing genetic variation in promoting adaptive evolution and how marine stickleback demography influences the colonization of freshwater habitats.

Logan Lacy

Logan is joining the lab as a Ph.D. student in the fall of 2025.  Details of his research are coming soon.

Caitlin Wise

Caitlin is a Ph.D student that joined the lab in September 2021. Caitlin is interested in the genetic basic of adaption across environmental gradients.
In the lab, she integrates field work, lab experiments, and genomics to understand
the selective landscape imposed by both biotic and abiotic factors to predict
evolutionary responses under projected future climate scenarios. Such work allows
us to assess population genome health and inform conservation strategies across
changing environmental landscapes.

Lab Technician

Kourtney Barber

Kourtney joined the lab as a technician in the May of 2025. Details of her research are coming soon.

Lab Alumni

Andreas Härer

Andi joined the lab as a PostDoc in February 2020. He finished his Ph.D. at the University of Konstanz, Germany in 2018, followed by a one-year PostDoc. He mainly studied the visual system and gut microbiota of Neotropical cichlids to better understand how organisms adapt to different environments. Particularly, he is interested in how much of the phenotypic variation is environmentally induced (phenotypic plasticity) or genetically determined (adaptive evolution) and to what extent phenotypic change in response to shared environmental conditions can be predicted (parallel evolution). At UCSD, Andi was working on eco-evolutionary projects involving the gut microbiota of threespine stickleback. His work combined studies of natural populations with controlled laboratory experiments. 

Link to Andi’s website

Denise Meier (BS) – Parallel phenotypic evolution of benthic and limnetic stickleback

Emma Kurstjens (BS/MS) – Factors that affect gut microbiome diversity in wild stickleback.

Christina Puzzanghera (BS/MS) – The effect of predation on sexual dimorphism.

Elizabeth Tapanes (Postdoctoral Fellow, 2021 – 2023) – Parallel genomics and pigmentation.

Mia Tonkin (BS) – Phenotypic changes associated with variation in gut microbiota.

Brandon Tsai (BS/MS) – Correlated evolution of suites of traits in lab reared fish.

Laura Varey (BS/MS) – Differential selection on lateral plates.