Mark Bitter 

Mark is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Petrov lab, working jointly with Paul Schmidt’s group at the University of Pennsylvania (2020-now). During his PhD at the University of Chicago with Cathy Pfister, Mark demonstrated how the standing variation present in natural populations of the Mediterranean mussel could facilitate rapid adaptation to the declines in seawater pH expected as a result of global climate change read the publication here. Mark is currently using a semi-natural mesocosm experimental system to explore patterns of seasonal adaptation in Drosophila melanogaster. His current projects address the following: How finely do populations adaptively track a fluctuating environment? How parallel are patterns of adaptation in cyclically fluctuating environments? How stable is the genotype-to-phenotype map throughout the course of evolution?