Associate Professor;
Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1993

POSITIONS AVAILABLE for postdoctoral investigators, graduate students, and undergraduate students (starting in 2008).

Research and Professional Interests:

Members of the same species are enormously variable for traits like reproductive behavior, fecundity, mating success and lifespan. I am mainly interested in understanding why this is so. A simplistic view of evolution would lead one to believe that natural selection should eliminate most genetic diversity for traits like these because they are under strong natural selection. More sophisticated evolutionary models indicate that genetic variation in these fitness-related traits could be adaptive (actively maintained by natural selection) non-adaptive (maintained by continuous input of new mutation or migration), or a mixture of both. We are interested in identifying genes responsible for fitness variation in animals, and in determining the evolutionary causes and consequences of this genetic diversity. These questions are closely tied to evolutionary models of sexual selection, mate choice, and aging, so my lab is actively involved in evaluating many of these models. Members of the lab are currently studying (1) variation in courtship behavior in both insects and fish; (2) variation in life history traits including fecundity, lifespan and rates of aging, (3) ecological genetics of color pattern variation, mate choice, and survival in guppies, and (4) the neural genomic basis of courtship variation within and among live-bearing fishes. We use many different experimental techniques including field experiments, population and quantitative genetics, molecular kinship analysis, and genomic analysis of gene expression. Students and postdoctoral associates have worked on several different organisms including fruit flies, honey bees, and guppies.

Ruedi, E. A. and K. A. Hughes. 2009. Age, but not experience, affects courtship gene expression in male Drosophila melanogaster. PLoS One 4(7): e6150.

Hampton, KJ., K. A. Hughes, and A. E. Houde. 2009. The allure of the distinctive: reduced sexual responsiveness of female guppies (Poecilia reticulata) to ‘redundant’ male colour patterns. Ethology 115:475-481.

Remolina, S. C. and K. A. Hughes. 2008. Evolutionary and mechanistic basis of long life and high fertility in queen honey bees. AGE: Journal of the American Aging Association 30: 177-185.

Ruedi, E. A., and K. A. Hughes. 2008. Natural genetic variation in the courtship repertoire of male Drosophila melanogaster. Behavior Genetics 38: 424-436.

Remolina, S. C., D. Hafez, G. E. Robinson, and K. A. Hughes. 2007. Senescence in the worker honey bee Apis mellifera. Journal of Insect Physiology 53:1027-1033.

Corona, M., R. Velarde, S. Remolina, A. Moran-Lauter, Y. Wang, K. A. Hughes, and G. E. Robinson. 2007. Vitellogenin, juvenile hormone, insulin signaling, and queen honey bee longevity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 104:7128-7133.

Olendorf, R., F. H. Rodd, D. Punzalan, A. E. Houde, C. Hurt, D. N. Reznick, and K. A. Hughes. 2006. Frequency-dependent survival in natural guppy populations. Nature 441:633-636.

Hughes, K. A., and J. Leips. 2006. Quantitative trait locus analysis of mating success and sperm competition in Drosophila melanogaster. Evolution 60:1427-1434

Fraser, Bonnie

Graduate Students:

Everhart, Denise
Janowitz-Day, Ilana
Ren, Yingxue

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