PEGL Members

The PEGL (Webster Lab) welcomes people of any race, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, or disability status.

While PEGL is based at the University of Utah, we have members from a number of different institutions. Together, we all share an interest in fostering a safe, inclusive, supportive, and collaborative environment in which we work together to understand human and nonhuman primate diversity.

Current Lab Members

Tim Webster, Ph.D.
he/him/his
Principal Investigator
timothy.h.webster (at) utah.edu
Website

0000-0003-1174-2395

Scholar Citations

@TimWebster17

thw17

Tim was an undergraduate at Miami University (Ohio), graduating in 2008 a BA in Anthropology and Zoology. While he was there, he worked with Linda Marchant and Scott Suarez, both in the Department of Anthropology, on projects related to primate behavior.

After Miami, Tim spent part of 2008 as a Junior Visiting Research Fellow in the Leverhulme Center for Human Evolutionary Studies (LCHES) at the University of Cambridge working with Bill McGrew. He then spent the rest of 2008 studying chimpanzees at Semliki, Uganda.

Tim then moved to Connecticut to earn a Ph.D in biological anthropology from Yale University. At Yale, Tim worked with David Watts and Brenda Bradley, initially studying the behavior of chimpanzees at Ngogo, Uganda, before he ended up taking up genomics to begin exploring questions related to speciation in primates.

After graduate school, Tim did a postdoc with Melissa Wilson in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. During this time, he worked on a variety of genomic projects involving reptile evolution and sex chromosomes.

Starting in January, 2019, Tim became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Utah. He also currently serves as the President of the American Association of Anthropological Genetics.

Rebecca Seegraber
she/her/hers
Graduate Student
rebecca.seegraber (at) anthro.utah.edu

0000-0002-2816-4555

rseegraber

Rebecca received undergraduate degrees in Ecology & Organismal Biology and Anthropology from the University of Montana. She is currently a first-year graduate student working in PEGL. Her research interests include ecological and evolutionary genomics of non-human primate species, particularly sex chromosome evolution and sex-biased demography.

Andrew J. Zamora
He/Him/His
Ph.D. Student (UMass Amherst)
azamora@umass.edu

0000-0003-4414-8958

andrew-zamora-1b352414a

Scholar Citations

SerotoninergicLemur

Andrew Zamora is a PhD candidate under Dr. Jason Kamilar at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He uses comparative genomics to investigate how genetic networks involved in the regulation of social behavior have evolved across Indriid primates and how the evolutionary history of those networks has been potentially shaped by the ecological and social environment of each species. Andrew has also studied primate socioecology, community structure, phylogenetics, functional morphometrics, and cognition in a variety of extant and extinct taxa. He’s had the pleasure of studying two terrific primate species (Propithecus edwardsi and P. deckenii) in Madagascar and really misses the people he worked with and food he would eat while he was there.