Summary
Overview
Work History
Education
Skills
Timeline
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Allyson Dekovich

Knoxville,TN

Summary

Journal Articles: 2 peer-reviewed articles, h-index: 2

Conference Proceedings: 2 posters, and 4 oral presentations

Funding: Awarded $37,300 from combined internal and private sources to support research activities, publication costs, conference travel, and award recognition.

Overview

9
9
years of professional experience

Work History

Graduate Research Assistant

University of Tennessee
07.2020 - Current
  • Conducted the first population genetic analysis of the understudied inquiline social parasite Solenopsis daguerrei - a potential biological control agent of invasive fire Solenopsis fire ants - and its host species using microsatellites.
  • Applied genomic cline models to reduced representation sequencing data (RRS; RAD-Seq) from S. invicta x S. richteri fire ant hybrids to identify candidate SNPs that maintain species boundaries and drive adaptive divergence.
  • Conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) using S. invicta x S. richteri fire ant hybrids to detect genomic regions linked to phenotypic divergence in Solenopsis fire ants.
  • Sequencing and assembling the long-read genome of S. richteri to enable comparative genomic analysis with S. invicta, aiming to identify key structural differences in the genome architectures of these two species.
  • Served as a bioinformatics consultant and collaborator on several population genetics side projects, including: 1) conducting genetic analysis to delimit a new Tapinoma pavement ant species, 2) performing de novo SNP-calling assess population structure in the underutilized crop frafra potato (Coleus rotundifolius), and 3) analyzing the shifts in microbial community composition in dairy manure pre- and post-digestion by the black soldier fly (Hermetia illucens).
  • Served as a teaching assistant for multiple genomics-focused classes and workshops, providing instruction on various subjects such as command line fundamentals, SNP-calling, structural variant calling, genome assembly and annotation, and RNA-Seq analysis.

Undergraduate Research Assistant

Oakland University
05.2016 - 05.2018
  • Employed an in-house bioinformatic pipeline to generate maximum likelihood (ML) phylogenies across permuted taxonomic subsets of Terrabacteria, assessing the impact of sampling bias on phylogenetic backbone stability.

Education

Ph.D. - Entomology, Plant Pathology, And Nematology

University of Tennessee
Knoxville
12-2025

Master of Science - Entomology And Plant Pathology

University of Tennessee
Knoxville
05-2022

Bachelor of Science - Biology

Oakland University
Rochester, MI
12-2017

Skills

    Languages: Skilled in R, Python, and bash; familiarity with awk and SQL

    High Performance Computing (HPC): Expertise with SLURM and PBS schedulers

    Workflow and Environment Management: Proficient in Conda, Mamba, Singularity, and Docker; familiar with Nextflow

    Wet-Lab Techniques: High molecular weight (HMW) and fecal DNA extractions

    Sequencing Technologies: Illumina, Oxford Nanopore

    Highlighted Open Source Tools: PLINK, bwa, samtools, igv, GATK, STACKS, bcftools, GEMMA, BioPython, Mr Bayes, tidyverse

    Other: Github/git version control, RStudio, statistical analysis, machine learning, genome-wide association study (GWAS), population genetics and genomics, evolutionary biology

Timeline

Graduate Research Assistant

University of Tennessee
07.2020 - Current

Undergraduate Research Assistant

Oakland University
05.2016 - 05.2018

Ph.D. - Entomology, Plant Pathology, And Nematology

University of Tennessee

Master of Science - Entomology And Plant Pathology

University of Tennessee

Bachelor of Science - Biology

Oakland University

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Allyson Dekovich