User:Justin.bagley

Welcome

Hi, I'm Justin Bagley. Welcome to my Wikipedia page!

I am an evolutionary biologist and ichthyologist. I am new to Wikipedia; however, as an expert in evolutionary biology including the fields of phylogeography, population genomics, phylogenetic systematics and taxonomy, I hope to be able to add and improve Wikipedia content in these and related areas through writing and editing articles.

To date, I have not had much time for Wikipedia, but I am interested in becoming a Wikipedian for both personal and professional reasons. First, I myself have benefited substantially from easy access to information through Wikipedia. Now is my chance to give back. As a second example, alongside much great information, I have recently noticed some inaccuracies in these pages, poor writing, as well as articles that need to be written/added. I have become particularly interested in pages on evolutionary processes described on Wikipedia, as well as the gaps in species/taxonomy pages or basic ecological information in those pages. As a final reason for my interest in Wikipedia, I am a lifelong learner and advocate for education, and I get excited about free and open access to information, especially to scientific research and resources; alongside Open Access publishing, Wikipedia is one of the premium outlets worldwide for information.

Some of my credentials are given in the Biography section below and in the links to my website and blog. I have experience in bioinformatics and computer programming, both of which make up a routine part of my day-to-day activities as a researcher. Given my particular path during graduate/PhD training, I also have a solid background in the basics of philosophy and philosophy of biology.

Additionally, my career in biology has taken me through multiple periods as an expat living and working in Argentina and Brazil, and these experiences have helped to fuel my deep interest in Latin American cultures and languages (I speak English, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese).

Biography

Dr. Justin C. Bagley is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology at Jacksonville State University, and an Affiliate Researcher in the Department of Biology at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is professor for majors/non-majors Introductory Biology I, graduate Seminar in Systematics, Ecology, and Ichthyology. A researcher in ecological and evolutionary genetics of animals and plants in North America and the Neotropics, Dr. Bagley previously trained as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Biology at the University of Missouri–St. Louis (UMSL), Virginia Commonwealth University, and the Departamento de Zoologia at Universidade de Brasília. He is the developer of PIrANHA, MAGNET, RADish, and other software/repositories for analyzing population genomic and phylogenomic datasets.

After receiving his BS and MSc degrees in Biology from The University of Alabama in 2004 and 2008, along with training as an ichthyologist (systematic ichthyology), Justin received his PhD in Integrative Biology in 2014 from Brigham Young University for his work on comparative phylogeography and species delimitation in Central American freshwater fishes under Dr. Jerry Johnson. He was a Young Talent Fellow postdoc in Brazil's CNPq Science Without Borders program under Drs. Francisco Langeani and Guarino Colli at the Universidade de Brasília, 2015–2017, and during 2017 to 2018, he completed a postdoc in Dr. Andrew Eckert's Plant Evolutionary Genetics Laboratory at Virginia Commonwealth University on the genomics of ecological speciation and local adaptation in southwestern white pine (Pinus strobiformis). At UMSL, he was a plant phylogenomics postdoc under Dr. Nathan Muchhala. Postdoctoral training gave him exposure to a number of approaches in high-throughput sequencing (genomics) of reduced representation libraries, including ddRAD-seq, genotyping-by-sequencing, and targeted sequence capture (ultraconserved elements (UCEs) and Hyb-Seq).

Justin is an evolutionary biologist focusing on problems in molecular ecology and biodiversity science – particularly the use of genome-wide SNP and sequence capture data to understand how historical and ecological processes shape the spatial and temporal distributions of biodiversity in freshwater and terrestrial environments. Current research projects focus on molecular phylogeography, speciation, and local adaptation in North American and Neotropical plants (forest trees, Andean wildflowers) and freshwater fishes (livebearing fishes, suckers).

Justin is a reviewer for Systematic Biology, Molecular Ecology, Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, PeerJ, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, and a dozen other journals in ecology and evolutionary biology.

Links

My website: https://justinbagley.org

My blog: https://justinbagley.rbind.io

GitHub: https://github.com/justincbagley