Tom Giarla
Instructor in Biology
Ph.D., 2013 (expected), University of Minnesota, Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior
B.A., 2007, Washington University in St. Louis
Email: giarla@stolaf.edu
Office: Regents Hall 414
Research Website: www.umn.edu/~giarla
I am an evolutionary biologist finishing up my Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior and advised by Dr. Sharon Jansa. Through my research I hope to gain a better understanding of the geographic and ecological forces that have influenced the evolutionary processes of speciation and diversification, especially in mammals. In the spring of 2013, I will be teaching "Evolution and Diversity" here at St. Olaf.
As a Ph.D. student, I have worked on projects involving the phylogeography of nesomyine rodents native to Madagascar, the diversification of Muroid rodents as a whole, and the evolution of venom resistance in several opossum species. For my dissertation I am studying the systematics and phylogeography of Thylamys mouse opossums, a genus of small, New World marsupials distributed broadly in the open habitats of central and southern South America.