About
I am a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Data Science Institute and the Department of the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago, working under the supervision of David Jablonski. My research combines genomic tools with morphological and environmental datasets, as well as methods in machine learning, to address questions spanning the fields of systematics, macroevolution, and population and conservation genomics. Broadly, I explore historical patterns relevant to evolutionary theory and the conservation of aquatic biodiversity in the face of today’s heightened extinction risks.
Contact me at ghezelayagh@uchicago.edu
Publications
Prolonged morphological expansion of spiny-rayed fishes following the end-Cretaceous
A Ghezelayagh, RC Harrington, ED Burress, MA Campbell, JC Buckner...
Nature Ecology & Evolution 6 (8), 1211-1220
Spiny-rayed fishes (Acanthomorpha) dominate modern marine habitats and account for more than a quarter of all living vertebrate species. Previous time-calibrated phylogenies and patterns from the fossil record explain this dominance by correlating the origin of major acanthomorph lineages with the Cretaceous–Palaeogene mass extinction. Here we infer a time-calibrated phylogeny...
Accelerated Diversification Explains the Exceptional Species Richness of Tropical Characoid Fishes
BF Melo, BL Sidlauskas, TJ Near, FF Roxo, A Ghezelayagh...
Systematic Biology 71 (1), 78-92
The Neotropics harbor the most species-rich freshwater fish fauna on the planet, but the timing of that exceptional diversification remains unclear. Did the Neotropics accumulate species steadily throughout their long history, or attain their remarkable diversity recently? We used 1288 ultraconserved element loci spanning 293 species, 211 genera, and 21 families of characoid fishes to reconstruct a new, fossil-calibrated phylogeny and infer the most likely diversification scenario for a clade that includes a third of Neotropical fish diversity...
Synergistic innovations enabled the radiation of anglerfishes in the deep open ocean
CD Brownstein, KL Zapfe, S Lott, RC Harrington, A Ghezelayagh...
Current Biology 34 (11), 2541-2550. e4
Major ecological transitions are thought to fuel diversification, but whether they are contingent on the evolution of certain traits called key innovations is unclear. Key innovations are routinely invoked to explain how lineages rapidly exploit new ecological opportunities. However, investigations of key innovations often focus on single traits rather than considering trait combinations that collectively produce effects of interest. Here, we investigate the evolution of synergistic trait interactions in anglerfishes, which include one of the most species-rich vertebrate clades in the bathypelagic, or “midnight,” zone of the deep sea: Ceratioidea...