Growing up in Florida with many family dogs, Amanda fell in love with the study of nature. After earning her Ph.D. in Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of Florida, she began a post-doc at the University of Michigan studying canine evolution in the lab of Dr. Jeffrey Kidd. Her research focuses on the evolutionary history of dogs and wolves, as well as genome variation across canine populations.
Dr. Kidd received his Ph.D. in Genome Sciences from the University of Washington where he studied the impact of genomic structural and copy-number variation. As a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford, he used population genetics models to understand the history of human populations and became fascinated with the evolution of modern dogs. Since 2012, Dr. Kidd has been at the University of Michigan where his lab studies the causes and consequences of genome variation as it relates to evolution and human disease.