Ana L. Caicedo

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

Ana obtained her B.S. in Biology in 1996 at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She left the lofty peaks of the Andes for the (flatter) environment of the Midwest U.S. to attend graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis; there she studied the population genetics of disease resistance genes in wild tomatoes and received her Ph.D. in 2003. During a postdoc at NC State, she carried out research on the evolutionary genomics of rice domestication and the population genetics of floral timing genes in Arabidopsis thaliana. Ana joined the UMass Biology faculty in 2006. Her current research interests include the genetic basis of adaptation, the genomics of plant domestication, and the population genetics of diversification within and between species.

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Damilola Alex Raiyemo

Postdoctoral Researcher

Alex is an applied plant genomics and weed science researcher. He obtained his PhD at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he characterized the chloroplast genomes and sex chromosomes of weedy dioecious amaranths. Alex’s research at UMass focuses on investigating the geographic and ecological drivers of genetic variation in the parasitic weed Cuscuta through landscape‑scale population genomics

e-mail: draiyemo_at_umass.edu

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Maryam Rashidzade

PhD student, Plant Biology

Maryam is a Ph.D. student in the Plant Biology Graduate Program. She rotated in Spring 2021 and joined the lab. She received B.S. and M.Sc. in Horticulture from the University of Tehran, Iran. She is mostly interested in population genetics, evolution, and plant-pathogen coevolution.

e-mail: mrashidzade_at_umass.edu

Tori Ford

PhD student, Plant Biology

Tori Ford is a PhD student in the Plant Biology Graduate Program. They rotated in Fall 2024 and joined the lab in Spring 2025. They are mainly interested in the genetic underpinnings of Vavilovian mimicry in Vicia sativa. They are broadly interested in population genetics, biogeography, herbarium studies, species distribution modeling, and computational biology.

e-mail: toriford_at_umass.edu

Ludmila Tyler

Collaborator

Ludmila Tyler is a Senior Lecturer in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department. Her interests include the genetics, cell walls, and developmental biology of plants, as well as bioenergy and undergraduate education. In the lab, her focus is on the genomics and natural variation of the model grass Brachypodium distachyon.

e-mail: ludmilat_at_umass.edu

Dvija Bhadani

Undergraduate Researcher

Dvija is an undergraduate Biology major and a Lee-SIP scholar. In the lab, she is assisting Maryam with tomato inoculations with Fusarium and quantitive PCR.

email: dbhadani_at_umass.edu

Helena Duffy

Undergraduate researcher

Helena is an undergraduate Plant and Soil Science student. She joined the lab in spring of 2025 and is learning dodder growth and care from Jess, as well as dodder microscopy.

e-mail: hduffy_at_umass.edu

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Aaron Cashton

Undergraduate researcher

Aaron is an undergraduate Biology major with a focus in genetics and microbiology. He joined in the fall of 2023 working with undergraduate Jessica Matheson on the dodder project, analyzing haustarical attachments of different dodder species and hosts. He is further interested in biotechnology research and industry and plans to find a career there.

e-mail: acashton_at_umass.edu