Sofia Casasa
Postdoctoral researcher
Contact
Email: Sofia Casasa
Phone: +1 812 856 1783
Biosketch
Sofia is a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Erik Ragsdale at Indiana University. Her postdoctoral and PhD work focused on the developmental and genetic mechanisms, as well as evolutionary consequences, of phenotypic plasticity. For her PhD, she used horned beetles from the genus Onthophagus to investigate the mechanisms that enable nutrition-responsive growth, and how these mechanisms themselves have evolved and contributed to the diversity in scaling relationships. Sofia also studied the role of ancestral plasticity in facilitating rapid evolution in the face of novel conditions. As a postdoctoral researcher, her work now uses extraordinarily diverse diplogastrid nematodes to study how the mechanisms of polyphenic development have evolved across closely related species.