Kawahara, Akito Y.

University of Maryland Dept. of Entomology 4112 Plant Sciences College Park, MD 20742-4454 USA 301.405.2089 voice 301.312.9290 facsimile kawahara@umd.edu http://entmcv.umd.edu

I am a graduate student at University of Maryland in the lab of Charles Mitter and part of the MCSE Graduate Research Program. My interest is in in large-scale molecular phylogenetic analyses including many taxa and characters, and in combining different sources of data. My primary research focus is in the systematics of butterflies and moths (Insecta: Lepidoptera), and am involved in the Lepidoptera Tree of Life (www.leptree.net), a project funded by NSF's Assembling the Tree of Life (AToL).

Molecular phylogenetic analysis of hawkmoths (Sphingidae): Hawkmoths are one of the most conspicuous groups of insects. They have provided models for biological studies as diverse as biochemistry, functional morphology, nutritional ecology, physiology, plant-insect interactions, pollination biology, biogeography, population genetics and developmental genetics. Due to their large size and ease of sampling, sphingids have also been used as a focal group in faunistic studies to assess habitat quality for conservation, and some are agricultural pests. With the development of DNA barcoding, sphingids have become a model group to study species boundaries. Despite this diversity of scientific interest, there has yet to be a comprehensive study of their higher-level relationships based on explicit phylogenetic methodology. The project utilizes multiple independent nuclear loci to construct a phylogeny of hawkmoths, and to understand life-history evolution in this ecologically diverse family. The project also explores the effect of adding taxa represented only by a short mitochondrial sequence to the nuclear dataset.

Deep-level phylogenetics of Lepidoptera: The LepTree Team (www.leptree.net), is generating a dataset of 26 nuclear genes to construct a molecular 'backbone' phylogeny of Lepidoptera, the goal of which is to estimate relationships among 127 lepidopteran families. This backbone phylogeny will be used to understand major transitions in Lepidoptera ecology and evolution. Recent ML analyses explore the effect of increasing taxon sampling to nearly 1800 taxa.