Our goal is to attract and retain talented and diverse trainees to earn PhDs in their home departments and programs with an emphasis on interdisciplinary training that focuses on sexual development and reproductive behavior. We will also provide advanced training to recent PhDs.
For information on how CTRD has shaped the lives of past trainees and where they are now, see Testimonials.
Taylor's research explores how the timing and spacing of reproductive transitions (e.g., puberty, pregnancy, and menopause) shape women’s mental health across the lifespan. Drawing on developmental, hormonal, and sociocultural frameworks, her work examines why females are disproportionately affected by depression during these hormonally sensitive periods and how early life adversity, reproductive timing, and societal context intersect to increase vulnerability. Taylor is especially interested in how developmental mismatches between biological and psychosocial readiness may produce gendered disease pathways.
Hannah FinkHannah’s research explores how seasonal transitions in reproductive activity influence the steroid signaling pathways underlying aggression in females. Using Siberian hamsters, a non-model species that exhibits heightened aggression during the non-breeding season, Hannah’s doctoral work seeks to understand how neurally synthesized estrogens rapidly influence female-female aggression. Going forward, Hannah will continue her research into the interaction of sex with cellular-level processes that lead to integrated behavioral responses.
Josie Fornara
Josie's dissertation focuses on the proximate causes and evolutionary consequences of territorial aggression in wild tree swallows, a common North American songbird. Specifically, Josie wants to know how various internal factors (e.g., genotype, gene expression, hormones, sex, lived experience) and external factors (e.g., developmental environment, current social environment) come together to shape the organismal phenotype. To address these questions, Josie is leveraging molecular techniques alongside 10+ years of behavioral/demographic data from the same tree swallow population. By pioneering this whole-organism approach in females, Josie hopes to lay the foundation for future comparative work across species and among sexes.
Sara Isgate
Dustin Rousselle
Dustin is interested in how air pollution effects lung health and what role sex plays in these changes. His work aims to understand why women tend to have worse health outcomes when exposed to air pollution, such as higher mortality, greater inflammation, and greater exacerbation to existing lung disease. Due to a lack of research in this field, his current project is examining the role of sex on ozone-induced lung inflammation. By using a specialized mouse model, Dustin will understand how the individual components of sex (chromosomal and gonadal sex) alter lung function and immune response when exposed to chronic ozone. He hopes to continue this research in the by examining the molecular pathways responsible for these changes.
Ellie Shell
In response to changes in the environment, organisms can alter their traits, whether those traits are physiological responses, morphology, or behavioral (even how they choose a mate!).This ability to response to environmental variation is called plasticity. Ellie’s work focuses on determining how plasticity in adult mate choice can affect offspring plasticity and fitness using the Eastern Spadefoot toad (Scaphiopus holbrookii). She is specifically interested in how the role of the environment effects evolutionary processes, aimed at exploring whether changing climates enable or hinder adaptations of individuals. With a complex life history (anuran parents inhabit land and tadpoles inhabit bodies of water), frogs are an ideal system to study the maintenance of fitness across distinct environments. Using behavioral and physiological approaches, her dissertation will assess how shifts in temperature will affect the evolution of fitness related traits across generations.
Emma’s dissertation project explores the development of sexuality between young and established adulthood. In particular, she focuses on how relationships and family formation are associated with change in sexual behavior and/or orientation for young women. While changes in sexual behavior over the life course are well-documented in scientific literature, our understanding of the fluidity of sexual orientation identity is still lacking. Specifically, how sexual orientation changes (or remains stable) over time in relation to changes in sexual behavior, relationships, pregnancy desires, among other social factors over the life course. This project aligns with her broader research agenda, which seeks to better understand the development of sexuality and sexual orientation throughout life, and specifically the institutions which shape this process.
Courtney WatersCourtney's dissertation focuses on the neural mechanisms underlying how mice process and respond to vocal communication signals from conspecifics in courtship interactions. In particular, she is interested in auditory midbrain regions in males as they respond to female vocal rejection cues during courtship and the role of neuropeptides in modulating neuronal activity and social behavior. Her current projects focus on changes in the activity of a population of vasoactive intestinal polypeptide-producing neurons in the inferior colliculus following playback of female vocalizations. She combines behavioral, hormonal manipulation, and cell tagging techniques with the aim of developing a comprehensive understanding of how local circuitry impacts both sensory processing and behavioral output in a sex- and context-specific manner.
Elizabeth is a Biological Anthropology PhD Candidate in PEEL. She has worked with alloprimates for 10 years and in a variety of contexts. This includes Costa Rica, South Africa, Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest, Thailand, Bhutan, and now is conducting her PhD research in the Himalayas of India as the co-director of the Himalayan Langur Project. Elizabeth’s research aims to understand how mother-offspring dyads respond to anthropogenic stressors (food loss, human interactions, dog attacks, disruptive sounds) and investigate how social buffering effects dyad physiology (GMB and endocrine system) and behavior in response to the aforementioned stressors. Social buffering is a critical process for species, group, and individual survival and provides insight into primate adaptation, life history, and conservation, within changing landscapes. Additionally, she also focuses on community engagement, bioethical and ethnoprimatological theory, as well as visual anthropology within her research. Her education includes an MSc in Primate Behavior & Ecology from Central Washington University and a BA in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin.
Emily’s research investigated sex differences in response to nerve injury and subsequent treatment with gonadal hormones. Recovery from nerve injuries requires axons to regenerate back to denervated muscle and tissue, which is an unfortunately slow and flawed process often resulting in incorrect axonal connections. Males and females show inherently different rates of axon regeneration after nerve injury: males exhibit slower regeneration than females, potentially leading to worse recovery outcomes. Gonadal hormones have been implicated in this sex difference, and in fact, have been used as a treatment by accelerating recovery after nerve injury. Her dissertation aimed to directly compare the efficacy of androgenic and estrogenic hormone treatments to recover locomotor function, prevent injury-induced hyperalgesia, and protect integral spinal circuitry after sciatic nerve injury in male and female rats. Emily is now a Postdoctoral Fellow at Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center.
Yadira Pena-Garcia
In her research, Yadira investigated the factors driving variation in mutation rates across mammalian species. Specifically, Yadira focused on the male mutation bias, a phenomenon where fathers contribute more mutations to their offspring than mothers. Challenging the traditional view that replication errors are the main source of mutations, she and her lab introduced the ‘faulty male’ hypothesis, which proposes that most mutations arise from DNA damage and inefficient repair processes. Using genomic data from grizzly bears, her research revealed no significant reduction in mutation rates due to hibernation in bears, suggesting that replication during spermatogenesis is not the primary driver. Additionally, by using whole-genome sequencing data from opossum trios, she observed a strong male mutation bias, with most mutations being of paternal origin despite their early reproductive age, further supporting the ‘faulty male’ hypothesis. Yadira is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Public Health at Yale University.
Thea GesslerThea is broadly interested in the diversity of sexual development in vertebrates, how this diversity is organized and integrated across multiple organismal levels (e.g., genes, chromosomes, hormones, tissues, behavior), and how this diversity develops and evolves. For her dissertation, Thea used large scale omics analyses to study the evolution of gene regulation underlying sex determination in turtles with the aim to better understand the evolution of developmental plasticity and canalization. For her CTRD fellowship she will look at how diversity in sexual development can influence organismal biology more broadly. She will look at how naturally occurring intersex development and a propensity for sex transitions in green frogs (Lithobates clamitans) influences their brain development and behavior. She is particularly interested in how development might facilitate or limit these patterns.
Isaac is interested in harnessing comparative and integrative approaches to understand the evolution of social behavior. Isaac’s doctoral research traced how an individual prepares, participates, and succeeds at reproduction, thereby providing a powerful framework for the study of social behavior and its neuromolecular underpinnings in the highly social African cichlid fish, Astatotilapia burtoni. As a CTRD Postdoctoral Fellow working with Dr. Kim Rosvall and Dr. Matthew Hahn, Isaac plans to investigate how neurogenomic sex differences arise over the course of macroevolutionary time using a combination of neurobiological transcriptomic and evolutionary modeling approaches.
Rebecca researches variation in behavior and cognition in animals. Her work for the CTRD program focuses on factors that shape behavioral and cognitive differences in Onthophagus dung beetles. These factors span multiple levels of biological organization, including a) neurobiological mechanisms, such as brain gene expression; b) developmental behavioral plasticity, such as early-life nutrition and maternally-inherited microbiota; c) reproductive factors, such as sex and alternative reproductive tactics; and d) evolutionary drivers, such as the role of these species’ biological invasions across the USA and Australia.
