Prosanta Chakrabarty,
Ph.D.
What's New:
January 2010 - New Post-doc Matt Davis joins the lab; Vietnam field trip
December 2009 - Book Editor for Copeia and Assistant Editor for Journal of Fish Biology
October 2009 - LSU Fish Collection now on-line Click Here!
September 2009- Teaching Ichthyology (Biol/RNR 4145) and Systematics Discussion Group
August 2009- $520K NSF Grant funded; 1 yr. anniversary of being at LSU
July 2009- Elected to Board of Governors of American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists
June 2009- Western Australia collecting trip;8th Indo-Pacific Fish Conference
Assistant Professor/Curator of Ichthyology
Louisiana State University Museum of Natural Sciences
Research in my lab focuses on recovering the relationships of fishes in order to better understand evolutionary processes. My research interests are currently targeting two main fields: the evolution of bioluminescent systems and historical biogeography of freshwater fishes. Bioluminescent systems have evolved multiple times in fishes, predominantly among deep-sea clades. I am particularly interested in using phylogenetic tools to better understand how sexual selection on bioluminescent structures may have played a role in speciation. My biogeographic studies have looked at how fishes with low dispersal ability (such as blind cave fishes) came to be distributed across biogeographic barriers and how the distribution of freshwater fishes explain earth history. Students interested in working in my lab will learn molecular and morphological phylogenetic techniques, how to conduct geometric morphometric analyses, and various other tools to better understand fish biology.
