Anna L. Clarke

Anna is pursuing a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology. She attended Western Washington University as a National Merit Scholar, and was a Presidential Scholar at The University of Georgia on an undergraduate exchange. She received a B.S. (1998) cum laude in both environmental education and biology.

She has conducted studies on gopher frogs (Rana areolata) and copperheads (Agkistrodon contortrix). She is currently studying phylogenetic methods. While at KU, she has made two presentations at national meetings of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists: Amniote Phylogeny: A Total Evidence Approach, in 2000, and Total Evidence Phylogeny and Convergence: A Quest for 'Hidden Signal' Using an Amniote Example, in 2001. For her dissertation work, she is assessing the validity of the maximum likelihood method of phylogenetic analysis of molecular data, especially with regard to the method’s requirement for independent and identically distributed data. After finishing her Ph.D., Anna intends to continue her research and teach evolutionary biology at the university level.

Mentor: Walter W. Dimmick, Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology