Lab Members

Brandon T. Sinn, Ph.D.

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​I am currently a visiting associate professor in the Faculty of Biology at the University of Latvia and an assistant professor in the Dept. of Biology and Earth Science at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio, USA. I am an alumnus of the Freudenstein Lab at The Ohio State University, where I earned my Ph.D. in Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology. Following my dissertation studies, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Stevenson Lab at the New York Botanical Garden where I contributed to the Plant Ontology. I later served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Barrett Lab at West Virginia University, where my research focused on comparative genomics and phylogenomics.

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ResearchGate Profile

Katie Kirk (2021 - Present)

Katie is sequencing and characterizing mitochondrial genomes of Asarum, a genus of flowering plants in the Magnoliid clade. Katie's work will reveal whether our previous observations of genome instability in the plastid genomes of Asarum species is also true of the mitochondrial genome in these species.

Lab Alumni

Lea Wright (2021)

Lea tested primers for the sequencing of lengthy, low complexity plastid genome regions, which work really well! She also sequenced these regions for more than 10 taxa across the genus Asarum​. The plastid genomes in this group have experienced extreme microsatellite expansions and syntenic instability. The sequences generated by Lea will help us to better understand how these regions have changed through time, and how their evolution might have influenced plastid genome instability.

Rachel Muti (2019 - 2021)

Rachel received a Postbaccalaureate Intramural Research Training Award and is conducting research at The NIH Eunice Kennedy Shriver Institute of Children's Health and Human Development. Rachel conducted her undergraduate thesis work in the Sinn Lab, using multi-tissue RNAseq and Oxford Nanopore sequencing to study Whirly1 evolution and differential splicing, expression and exon usage in Corallorhiza, a genus of orchids comprising partial and full mycoheterophs. 

Jenna Howard (Fall 2019)

Jenna was interested in gaining some lab skills during her first semester. In that short time she was able to completely assemble the plastome of Asarum maximum and conduct a preliminary investigation of ISSR variation in Asarum rosei, a species endemic to a single gorge in North Carolina.