Congratulations to Adams Megalomyrmex Ant Lab PhD student, Matt Boot, who received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program award (GRFP)! Matt studies leafcutter ants in Panama to understand how variation affects the trajectory of evolution. In his own words, “To explore this eco-evolutionary interplay, I combine approaches from functional ecology, population ecology, and population genetics in order to model the dynamics of symbiotic organisms with the goal of understanding how complexity influences our expectations of biological outcomes. In particular, I am studying how geographic variation and frequency-dependent selection influence adaptive dynamics in the mercenary-ant system.” The GRFP grant from NSF provides support for graduate students and Matt will use this award to spend more time at his frills site studying ants.
