Ascidian evolution and ecology

I earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Evolution and Ecology (summa cum laude) from the University of California, Davis. At UC Davis, I worked with Jay Stachowicz to understand the recruitment patterns of fouling invertebrates and the role of predators in fouling community structure. At this time, I was introduced to ascidians because they were important members of the fouling community. I transitioned to evolutionary biology for my PhD at Cornell University, working with Rick Harrison on speciation and phylogenetics in the solitary ascidian genus Ciona (Nydam & Harrison, 2010). I chose this genus because Ciona robusta was the only species in the fouling community with a sequenced genome. For my postdoctoral work at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the laboratory of Tony De Tomaso, I focused on the evolution of allorecognition in Botryllus schlosseri (Nydam, Taylor, & De Tomaso, 2013).

Since 2012, I have been teaching and mentoring students in ascidian research at small liberal arts colleges: Centre College in Danville, KY, USA from 2012 to 2019 and Soka University of America in Aliso Viejo, CA, USA from 2019 to present. I have mentored ~20 female research students during this time, many of whom are co-authors on my publications. I have particularly enjoyed taking my students on collecting trips in England, France, Spain, and Florida.

While I have continued my work with Ciona introgression and Botryllus schlosseri allorecognition since becoming a faculty member (Nydam et al., 2017; Nydam, Giesbrecht, & Stephenson, 2017; Nydam, Stephenson, Waldman, & De Tomaso, 2017), I have also developed four new research areas, all with female collaborators. First, building on the work of Gretchen and Charles Lambert, I compared the ascidian community composition in California and Florida marinas at two time points, ~20 years apart (Nichols, Lambert, & Nydam, 2023; Nydam, Nichols, & Lambert, 2022), and I continue to survey the ascidian communities in southern California with a particular emphasis on identifying newly arrived species (Nydam, Stefaniak, Lambert, Counts, & López-Legentil, 2022; Figure 1). Second, I have worked with Lilian Palomino Alvarez and Rosana Rocha to describe 13 new species of ascidians in Mexico (Palomino-Alvarez, Nydam, Rocha, & Simoes, 2022). Third, with C. Sarah Cohen and Carmela Gissi I created well-supported phylogenomic trees of the ascidian genera Botrylloides and Botryllus, generating new phylogenomic markers for these groups in the process (Nydam et al., 2021; Nydam et al., 2023, in review; Figure 2). These trees are now being used to study the evolution of allorecognition in this group (Nydam et al., 2023, submitted for publication). Finally, I have received a grant from the National Science Foundation with Lauren Stefaniak and Susanna López-Legentil to develop phylogenomic resources for under-studied ascidian families in the context of species delimitation and microbial evolution in the Caribbean Sea.