About Me

Education: I'm a PhD student in the UConn EEB department.

Research Interests: I am interested in phylogenetic methods, and I'm part of Dr. Paul Lewis' lab.

Publications: YB Wang, A Milkey, A Li, MH Chen, L Kuo, PO Lewis. 2023. LoRaD: marginal likelihood estimation with haste (but no waste). Systematic Biology, 72(3), 639-648.

JR Hodge, Y Song, MA Wightman, A Milkey, B Tran, A Stajner, AS Roberts, CR Hemingson, PC Wainwright, SA Price. Constraints on the Ecomorphological Convergence of Zooplanktivorous Butterflyfishes. Integrative Organismal Biology, 3(1), obab014.

Research

My previous research focused on convergent evolution in morphology associated with transitions to selective zooplanktivory in butterflyfishes in the lab of Dr. Peter Wainwright.
Now, I focus on statistical phylogenetics. My most recent project has developed a better way of estimating marginal likelihood, which is used to compare competing Bayesian models.

Community

Teaching: Workshop on Molecular Evolution teaching assistant, summer 2023
BIOL1108 lab instructor, fall 2021, spring 2022, fall 2022 semesters
EEB2245 teaching assistant (undergraduate evolution), spring 2023 semester

Community Outreach: Here are links to lessons I have designed for students in the local community. Lessons are designed to introduce children to concepts in phylogenetics and systematics. Each link contains a zip file with worksheets printed out for students and/or powerpoint presentations given. Each zip folder also contains a "README" document with instructions for carrying out the lesson.
phylogenetics for kids
seabird evolution
shell identification

Departmental Efforts: As part of the UConn EEB grad student outreach committee, I created an outreach website to bring together outreach materials developed by graduate students in the department: EEB outreach

Contact

Email: Feel free to contact me at analisa.milkey@uconn.edu

Address: Analisa Milkey
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
University of Connecticut
Storrs, CT 06269-3043
U.S.A