Professor Andrea Betancourt

Personal Statement

I am an evolutionary geneticist, working to answer questions about adaptation such as: Do sex and recombination allow rapid adaptation? Does sex-linkage promote adaptation? How do organisms adapt so rapidly to transposable element invasions? To address these questions, I mainly use flies from the genus Drosophila as a model. Recent work has focused on the evolutionary impact of transposable elements, including that of a recent invasion of a Drosophila species by the sterility inducing P-element.

I obtained my B.Sc. from the University of Texas at Austin, my Ph.D. from the University of Rochester (supervised by Allen Orr), and did postdocs at the University of Edinburgh (with Brian Charlesworth) and the Vetmeduni Vienna (with Christian Schlötterer). I stayed on as a group leader in Vienna for a couple of years, before moving to the University of Liverpool.