How constrained is evolution? The importance of genetic redundancy in local adaptation

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Adaptation is central to evolution, but we are only beginning to answer fundamental questions about how it works: How commonly do species adapt to the same kind of environment in different ways? Why does this occur? What maintains the capacity of a species to adapt to changes in its environment? My research program uses computational approaches to explore how genetics can affect the outcome of evolution, and then seeks to test hypotheses that arise from this work using empirical datasets to answer these fundamental questions. In particular, my research program explores how populations adapt to heterogeneous environments, in which fitness trade-offs often prevent one phenotype from being optimal in all possible conditions. In such cases, the tension between divergent natural selection, migration, and recombination can greatly alter the genetic architecture that evolves: in some conditions, architectures tend to be characterized by fewer, larger, and more tightly clustered alleles, whereas in other conditions, they tend to be characterized by many small alleles distributed throughout the genome. This interplay between ecology and genetics can greatly affect the predicted outcome and repeatability of evolution, as well as the evolvability of a species.