Ph.D., University of Nottingham, England 1977 I participate in three graduate programs: Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology (EEOB); Genetics, Genomics, and Bioinformatics (GGB); and Microbiology. In addition, I participate in the Evolutionary Biology Joint-Doctoral Program with San Diego State University. I am a member of UCR's Center for Conservation Biology, which promotes conservation research and participate in the UC Intercampus Research Program on Experimental Evolution (UCIRPEE) I am the current Treasurer of the International Society for Evolution, Ecology, and Cancer (ISEEC), and an external faculty member of the Center for Evolution and Cancer at UCSF.

The evolution of cancer suppression This project arose from my interest in how selection acts at different levels of organization. Cancer results from a conflict between individual cells and an individual organism and, if all else is equal, cancer risk increases as animals become larger and/or longer lived. But big long-lived animals do not get more cancer (an observation I named Peto's paradox), due to adaptive change. We use an evolutionary approach to understand how different organisms have adapted to minimize the occurrence of cancer. Conservation genetics/genomics. Current areas of emphasis: effective population size, inbreeding, adaptation in a changing environment, and the role of wildlife linkages in long-term conservation strategies. Evolutionary genomics of the plant pathogenic bacterium Xylella fastidiosa. The goal of this project is to successfully apply the methods of evolutionary genomics to understand and ultimately control this bacterium that causes serious disease in a wide range of agricultural crops, including Pierce's disease of grapevine.