DEPARTMENT OF INTEGRATIVE BIOLOGY
SHARMA LAB
SHARMA LAB
Welcome to the Sharma Lab! Our research broadly addresses macroevolution of invertebrates through the lenses of phylogenomics, historical biogeography, and comparative development, with emphasis on arthropods.
This body of work integrates three avenues of inquiry:
(1) How is biodiversity distributed in time and space?
(2) How do geological phenomena affect the shape of biodiversity over time?
(3) What are the genetic mechanisms that underlie body plan diversification?
This body of work integrates three avenues of inquiry:
(1) How is biodiversity distributed in time and space?
(2) How do geological phenomena affect the shape of biodiversity over time?
(3) What are the genetic mechanisms that underlie body plan diversification?
Lab News & Events (updated: 5 May 2018):
18 May 2018: Our lab has just published the first transcriptomic analysis of pseudoscorpion venom! Many congratulations to Carlos Santibáñez-López, who led the bioinformatics, and Andrew Ontano, who collecting this material on his first field trip with Mark Harvey in Western Australia last summer!
15 May 2018: The written exercise of the course Zoology 957 (Topics in the Evolutionary Developmental Biology of Animals) has been profiled in spring 2018's newsletter of the Writing Across the Curriculum program. Check it out here!
11 May 2018: Congratulations to Guilherme Gainett on winning the International Society of Arachnology's Jan and Oscar Francke Award! This grant support Guilherme's efforts to pursue the study of leg elongation in whip spiders (Amblypygi)
9 May 2018: Congratulation to Emily Setton on winning an American Arachnological Society research award! Emily will be traveling to Colorado to collect the embryos of mygalomorph spiders this summer.
5 May 2018: Congratulations to Guilherme Gainett on (a) winning a UW-Madison travel award for attendance at the GIGA meeting in Curaçao, (b) winning the Davis research grant for developmental genetic study of leg elongation in whip spiders (Amblypygi), and (c) the acceptance of his paper in the Journal of Morphology. All in one week!
26 March 2018: Congratulations to Emily Setton on the publication of her undergraduate research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)! This work of (mostly) chelicerate evodevo features data from spiders, scorpions, harvestmen, centipedes, horseshoe crabs, onychophorans, and pycnogonids. Check it out here.
2 February 2018: We have just published the first phylogenomic dating of the scorpion tree of life! Check it out here.
24 January 2018: Congratulations to Jesus Ballesteros on being awarded a National Geographic Society grant! Dr. Ballesteros will be conducting fieldwork and population genomic surveys to investigate the evolution of cave dwelling arachnids in Israel.
17 January 2018: Congratulations to Jesus Ballesteros, whose painstaking and meticulous work on species delimitation in spiders just appeared online! See the article here.
7 January 2018: A lovely SICB meeting in San Francisco, with wonderful feedback for students and postdocs on their presentations! This year, PI Sharma is honored to serve as the Secretary-Elect of the Division of Evolutionary Developmental Biology. Congratulations as well to Emily Setton for a Charlotte Magnum Award!
1 December 2017: Six members of the lab will be attending the annual Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology in San Francisco (3-7 January 2018). We hope to see you there!
25 November 2017: Congratulations to Guilherme Gainett on the acceptance of his third paper this year!
31 July 2017: The i5k spider workgroup's analysis on the comparative genomics of Chelicerata is published in BMC Biology.
24 July 2017: Emily, Logan, and Erik's paper on the evolution of the gene spineless has been accepted for publication in Developmental Biology!
1 July 2017: The department has officially changed its name to Integrative Biology.
15 May 2017: Welcome to Audrey Crawford and Calvin So, our lab's new undergrads!
1 May 2017: Welcome to Jesus Ballasteros, a postdoctoral researcher and bioinformatician! Jesus joins the lab on a UW-Madison Guyer postdoctoral fellowship.
30 April 2017: Congratulations to Holly Cho on the completion of her Masters degree! Holly plans to pursue her next degree in science communication at UW-Madison.
25 April 2017: Welcome to Luis Boudouin Gonzalez, a visiting PhD student from the McGregor Lab at Oxford Brookes University! Luis joins us for one month to generate comparative expression data in harvestmen and spiders, the focus of his PhD project.
1 April 2017: An early welcome to Guilherme Gainett, who will be joining the lab as a graduate student in fall 2017!
19 September 2016: Welcome to Dr. Carlos Santibañez-López, a postdoctoral researcher and scorpion expert! Carlos joins the lab through the CONACYT fellowship program.
24 August 2016: Welcome to Andrew Ontano, a new graduate student in the Zoology PhD program!
1 June 2016: Welcome to Jill Oberski and Kenji Shoemaker, who join the lab to work on arachnology in summer 2016!
19 May 2016: The oldest armored harvestman fossil is named after PI Sharma. Petrobunoides sharmai was described from a ca. 99-Myr old amber specimen. Special thanks to Paul Selden, Jason Dunlop, Gonzalo Giribet, Weiwei Zhang, and Dong Ren!
15 March 2016: Welcome to Holly Cho, a new graduate student in the Cellular and Molecular Biology training program!
14 March 2016: Congratulations to Emily Setton on winning the Laudier Histology Student Travel Grant to attend the 2016 International Congress of Arachnology meeting in July 2016! Emily will present the outcomes of her Zoology 699 project on arachnid book lungs.
3 March 2016: PI Sharma is awarded an NSF CAREER grant from the Division of Integrative Organismal Systems for research on the parallel evolution of terrestrial respiratory systems in arthropods.
25 January 2016: Welcome to new undergraduate research assistants Savana Lipps and Alejandra Torres Diaz!
9 September 2015: Welcome to Emily Setton, an undergraduate at UW-Madison and the first member of the research team!
31 August 2015: Interviews begin for undergraduate research assistants. Interested in joining? Click here.
24 August 2015: Arrival at UW-Madison. Let's get to work, Plato.
18 May 2018: Our lab has just published the first transcriptomic analysis of pseudoscorpion venom! Many congratulations to Carlos Santibáñez-López, who led the bioinformatics, and Andrew Ontano, who collecting this material on his first field trip with Mark Harvey in Western Australia last summer!
15 May 2018: The written exercise of the course Zoology 957 (Topics in the Evolutionary Developmental Biology of Animals) has been profiled in spring 2018's newsletter of the Writing Across the Curriculum program. Check it out here!
11 May 2018: Congratulations to Guilherme Gainett on winning the International Society of Arachnology's Jan and Oscar Francke Award! This grant support Guilherme's efforts to pursue the study of leg elongation in whip spiders (Amblypygi)
9 May 2018: Congratulation to Emily Setton on winning an American Arachnological Society research award! Emily will be traveling to Colorado to collect the embryos of mygalomorph spiders this summer.
5 May 2018: Congratulations to Guilherme Gainett on (a) winning a UW-Madison travel award for attendance at the GIGA meeting in Curaçao, (b) winning the Davis research grant for developmental genetic study of leg elongation in whip spiders (Amblypygi), and (c) the acceptance of his paper in the Journal of Morphology. All in one week!
26 March 2018: Congratulations to Emily Setton on the publication of her undergraduate research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)! This work of (mostly) chelicerate evodevo features data from spiders, scorpions, harvestmen, centipedes, horseshoe crabs, onychophorans, and pycnogonids. Check it out here.
2 February 2018: We have just published the first phylogenomic dating of the scorpion tree of life! Check it out here.
24 January 2018: Congratulations to Jesus Ballesteros on being awarded a National Geographic Society grant! Dr. Ballesteros will be conducting fieldwork and population genomic surveys to investigate the evolution of cave dwelling arachnids in Israel.
17 January 2018: Congratulations to Jesus Ballesteros, whose painstaking and meticulous work on species delimitation in spiders just appeared online! See the article here.
7 January 2018: A lovely SICB meeting in San Francisco, with wonderful feedback for students and postdocs on their presentations! This year, PI Sharma is honored to serve as the Secretary-Elect of the Division of Evolutionary Developmental Biology. Congratulations as well to Emily Setton for a Charlotte Magnum Award!
1 December 2017: Six members of the lab will be attending the annual Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology in San Francisco (3-7 January 2018). We hope to see you there!
25 November 2017: Congratulations to Guilherme Gainett on the acceptance of his third paper this year!
31 July 2017: The i5k spider workgroup's analysis on the comparative genomics of Chelicerata is published in BMC Biology.
24 July 2017: Emily, Logan, and Erik's paper on the evolution of the gene spineless has been accepted for publication in Developmental Biology!
1 July 2017: The department has officially changed its name to Integrative Biology.
15 May 2017: Welcome to Audrey Crawford and Calvin So, our lab's new undergrads!
1 May 2017: Welcome to Jesus Ballasteros, a postdoctoral researcher and bioinformatician! Jesus joins the lab on a UW-Madison Guyer postdoctoral fellowship.
30 April 2017: Congratulations to Holly Cho on the completion of her Masters degree! Holly plans to pursue her next degree in science communication at UW-Madison.
25 April 2017: Welcome to Luis Boudouin Gonzalez, a visiting PhD student from the McGregor Lab at Oxford Brookes University! Luis joins us for one month to generate comparative expression data in harvestmen and spiders, the focus of his PhD project.
1 April 2017: An early welcome to Guilherme Gainett, who will be joining the lab as a graduate student in fall 2017!
19 September 2016: Welcome to Dr. Carlos Santibañez-López, a postdoctoral researcher and scorpion expert! Carlos joins the lab through the CONACYT fellowship program.
24 August 2016: Welcome to Andrew Ontano, a new graduate student in the Zoology PhD program!
1 June 2016: Welcome to Jill Oberski and Kenji Shoemaker, who join the lab to work on arachnology in summer 2016!
19 May 2016: The oldest armored harvestman fossil is named after PI Sharma. Petrobunoides sharmai was described from a ca. 99-Myr old amber specimen. Special thanks to Paul Selden, Jason Dunlop, Gonzalo Giribet, Weiwei Zhang, and Dong Ren!
15 March 2016: Welcome to Holly Cho, a new graduate student in the Cellular and Molecular Biology training program!
14 March 2016: Congratulations to Emily Setton on winning the Laudier Histology Student Travel Grant to attend the 2016 International Congress of Arachnology meeting in July 2016! Emily will present the outcomes of her Zoology 699 project on arachnid book lungs.
3 March 2016: PI Sharma is awarded an NSF CAREER grant from the Division of Integrative Organismal Systems for research on the parallel evolution of terrestrial respiratory systems in arthropods.
25 January 2016: Welcome to new undergraduate research assistants Savana Lipps and Alejandra Torres Diaz!
9 September 2015: Welcome to Emily Setton, an undergraduate at UW-Madison and the first member of the research team!
31 August 2015: Interviews begin for undergraduate research assistants. Interested in joining? Click here.
24 August 2015: Arrival at UW-Madison. Let's get to work, Plato.
