Bushra Shahid
Bushra Shahid
Student / Programme Doctorate at D-USYS
ETH Zürich
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Additional information
Research area
A phylogenetic study of the Dianthus radiation
The Dianthus taxon is the largest genera of Caryophyllaceae and one of the most diverse plant groups in Europe owing to rapid radiation and diversification. The taxon comprises more than 300 species with the distribution spanning across Eurasia and Africa, with most species presiding within Europe and including ploidy level variation. Despite the popularity, we still don't have a resolved Dianthus phylogeny or know the radiation's leading drivers.
Towards this, the main goal of my PhD is to tease apart the phylogenetics of the genus using a large amount of species' NGS data. This data will be used to identify evolutionary processes in Dianthus including macro and micro-evolutionary analyses to look for drivers of the radiation, signatures of selection, and discover patterns of introgression across the genome.
Publications
Shahid, BM, Burgin, GA and Hopkins, R. (2024). Experimental and genetic analysis of selfing reveals no reinforcement in Phlox cuspidata. International Journal of Plant Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1086/729299.
Education
2022 – present PhD student at the Plant Ecological Genetics lab, Department of Environmental Systems Science, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
2020 – 2022 Erasmus Mundus Master Program in Evolutionary Biology (MEME) at Uppsala University (Sweden), University of Montpellier (France) and Harvard University (USA)
2014 – 2018 BSc in Biology, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Pakistan
2014 St. Mary's Catholic High School, Dubai, UAE
Research Experience
2021 – 2022 Master thesis I: Autonomous selfing but no reinforcement in Phlox cuspidata
2020 – 2021 Master thesis II: Joint evolution of range sizes and ecological niches in angiosperms
2021 Summer fieldwork internship on Antirrhinum majus hybrid zone at the Institute of Science and Technology, Austria
2019 – 2020 Research Assistant in the Molecular Epidemiology and Microbiology Lab, LUMS, Pakistan
2017 Research intern in the Plant Molecular and Computation Biology labs, LUMS, Pakistan