Madeleine A. Becker

2026

• August - Starting as a Historical & Ancient DNA technician in the Laboratories of Analytical Biology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Can't wait to start this new adventure and work with tons of cool specimens!

• July - PhinisheD!!! I successfully defended my dissertation "Evolutionary Genomics of Channel Island Peromyscus" at George Mason University. I'm incredibly thankful for the support of my excellent committee, my collaborators, and my labmates at the Smithsonian NZCBI Center for Conservation Genomics. It's still surreal to have finally achieved this milestone, but the work isn't over!

• June - I was honored to give the Anna M. Jackson award talk at the American Society of Mammalogists Meeting, going over [too] much of my dissertation work on Channel Island deer mice. Huge thanks to ASM for the opportunity, award, and support throughout my graduate career!!

• May - Another chapter of my dissertation has been published, all stemming from a couple of 'weird' mitogenomes that raised some very perplexing questions about Peromyscus on the Channel Islands! TL;DR: we found Peromyscus truei among specimens collected on San Clemente Island in 1939. This was bizarre since a) nobody in the past 80 years seemed to notice there were non-deer-mice in the collections, b) no one has ever reported this species on the Channel Islands, and c) this species has actually never been reported on any islands ever before! It was a really interesting mystery to solve, with huge thanks to Kayce Bell at the LA County Natural History Museum for getting some mouse skulls under the microscope to verify our genomic results. Learn more about this fascinating story in the Therya article or in Kayce's bluesky thread.

2025

• July - Check out the first chapter of my dissertation, officially published online in a special issue of Western North American Naturalist for the 10th California Islands Symposium! We sequenced mitochondrial cyt b genes from Channel Island deer mice to test their taxonomic assignment within Peromyscus and try to understand their relationships to mainland deer mice. While we've now confirmed that they're closely related to a clade of mostly-California deer mice, P. gambelii, we still can't actually tell where island mice came from. This is due to a surprising amount of divergence between island mice and mainland California mice, in addition to a general lack of geographic structure across the mainland,. This is a tricky biogeographic puzzle that we hope to address in future research! Huge thanks to my co-authors for being game to collaborate on this short-notice, relatively small paper, that will have a big impact on our understanding of island mice. Also, thanks to the California Islands Symposium folks for making this special issue happen!!

• June - Evolution 2025 was a blast. SO much cool research being done across the tri-societies, and such great leadership and organization across the board! Such a great time, starting with a fantastic phylogenomics software school and ending with a ridiculously fun super-social. Get a conference that can do both! Former UCSB-SI scholar Ixel presented her work on southern river otter mitogenomes, and I [shockingly] gave a talk on island Peromyscus genomics.

• June - Another year of funding secured thanks to GMU's Doctoral Scholars program!! Immensely grateful for more time to work with the CCG to analyze terabytes of new island Peromyscus genomic data. 

• May - Got data? Some 300 Peromyscus have now been sequenced for low coverage whole genome sequencing. With this approach, each sample represents a very small piece of a puzzle, but all together, these data should give us a much clearer picture of what's going on, off and on the Channel Islands!

• April - Learn more about my research on the AGA's blog in their latest post! Huge thanks to the AGA for the award and for the chance to write about island mice museomics!

• March - HUGE news from the Mammal Diversity Database. Version 2.0 is a go online, our pre-print is live while it's in revision at Journal of Mammalogy, and the website has been completely redone! This represents years of hard work and expertise from Connor Burgin & Jelle Zijlstra, leadership from Nate Upham & David Huckaby, and did I mention Heru Handika *completely* rebuilding the website from the ground up inside of a year?? It's been a joy to be along the ride as a student assistant, watching the MDD grow 10x in size the past 5 years. Check out the new and improved MDD, and consider getting in touch if you have ideas for improvement or want to be involved on a taxonomic committee!

2024

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• December - One lane down: 1890s and 1940s specimens look great for their age! Thanks to subsampling whole claws, high endogenous content found across all samples in preliminary sequencing. Now we're ready for the big run!

• October - Back in the collections?? I couldn't help myself—I love sampling specimens and adding new research questions to my dissertation! Thanks to the Mammal team at NMNH for letting me back in to sample more mainland mice across the range of P. gambelii. Hopefully, this range-wide sampling will better contextualize the origins of insular mice across the Californias.

• June - Published my first first-author article in Marine Mammal Science on my work with Delphinus mitogenomes from my 2019 REU internship at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Many thanks to my co-authors for their work on the ground in Senegal and in the lab, and especially to my mentor Dr. Michael McGowen for his tremendous support and patience as I learned how to write a scientific paper! 

• May - Awarded another Grant-in-Aid from ASM for island mouse research—thank you ASM!

• May - Check out this great GMU write-up on my research and recent grants!

• April - Back at it again on Easter Monday at the Zoo despite torrential downpours. Luckily, the rain did not deter kids' love of fake animal poop! 

• March - Lots of good news: won a travel award from ASM to present at the upcoming mammal meeting in Boulder this June, and a coveted EECG award from the American Genetics Association to support my dissertation research! Thank you AGA and ASM!

• February - Submitted my first chapter on island mouse phylogeography for the Proceedings of the California Islands Symposium. Stay tuned to see what we found...

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2023

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• November - Gave my first in-person talk in Ventura at the California Islands Symposium about my island mouse preliminary findings: "Reconstructing Channel Island Deer Mouse Evolutionary History with Genome-Wide Ultraconserved Elements" while UCSB-Smithsonian Scholars Intern Cesar presented a fantastic poster: "Mitogenomes from the California Channel Island deer mice reveal new phylogenetic relationships"! Even more importantly, I visited Santa Cruz Island and saw island foxes, island scrub jays, and lots of marine mammals! 

• July - Presented a poster at the American Society of Mammalogists/International Mammalogical Conference: "Time series museomics" using the Channel Island 
  deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus subspp.)

• April - The National Zoo's Easter Monday scavenger egg hunt featured a Genetics table, where we talked to kids about getting DNA from scat and museum specimens! Kids loved touching the animal scat models almost as much as parents loved hearing that they were fake.

• February - Passed comprehensive exams and almost advanced to candidacy! Now back to the lab to actually do my proposed research!

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2022

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• November - Dissertation proposal, "Evolutionary Genomics of Channel Island Peromyscus", has been successfully defended! 

• June - First day working in the CCG ancient DNA lab... Mouse toes successfully digested, extracted, and quantified: we've got DNA!

• May - Awarded a Graduate Student Research Award by the Society for Systematic Biologists. Thanks SSB!

• May - Awarded a grant-in-aid and the Horner Award for best grants-in-aid proposal by the American Society of Mammalogists. Thanks ASM! 

• April - Finished P. maniculatus study skin sampling at museums. Thanks to mammal/vertebrate zoology departments at Los Angeles County Natural History Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, and Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History for access to their amazing collections!

• April - Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History profiled me and my research on island deer mice. Check it out!