Alan Bergland

Alan Bergland is an Associate Professor at the Department of Biology at UVA (2016-now) where his lab studies the interplay between ecological and evolutionary processes using genetics and genomics. As a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Petrov Lab (2010-2015) Alan worked on various projects aimed at the integration of the role of environmental variation with long- and short-term evolutionary processes through an understanding of the genetics, physiology, and morphology that regulate life histories. Specifically he investigated the evolution of D. melanogaster and D. simulans in temperate environments and discovered that hundreds of loci fluctuate in frequency by as much as 5-20% between the Fall and the Spring in temperate populations of D. melanogaster. This paper has become a classic in the field and has formed the basis of a large research program in the Petrov lab. The majority of Alan's work in the Petrov lab was part of a long-standing collaboration between the Petrov and Schmidt labs on the nature of seasonal evolution in Drosophila in space and time. During his graduate work at Brown University under the guidance or Marc Tatar, Alan focused on the relationship between larval nutrition and adult fecundity in Drosophila melanogaster. This research used a combination of evolutionary demography, ecology, molecular and quantitative genetics, and physiology to investigate how life history plasticity evolves in natural populations.