Devon DeRaad, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
UCLA La Kretz Center for California Conservation Science
Devon is an evolutionary biologist with a background in museum ornithology. His passion for interacting with and understanding biodiversity led him to a PhD program at the University of Kansas, where he defended his dissertation entitled “How and Why Genomes Lie: Case Studies in Birds of the Pacific Islands” with honors in 2024. His previous work focused on understanding how genetic diversity is distributed across the globe in a variety of bird lineages, with a special focus on the evolutionary mechanisms generating discordance across the genome.
Now as a La Kretz postdoctoral fellow in the Aguillon Lab, Devon is focused on understanding the genetics of potentially imperiled populations of scrub-jays (genus Aphelocoma) in California. Specifically, Devon has designed a project to investigate the evolutionary origin of a single mountain endemic subspecies (Aphelocoma californica cana) found in the California desert, east of Joshua Tree National Park. Additionally, he plans to use genomic data to better understand the evolutionary trajectory and long-term viability of the single-island endemic Island Scrub-Jay (Aphelocoma insularis), the only island endemic bird species native to the lower 48 states.
