Mukta Joshi

Research interests

I'm jointly supervised by Marko Mutanen, University of Oulu, Finland and Marianne Espeland at the ZFMK.

My PhD work focuses on species delimitation in butterflies and to test the potential of Anchored Hybrid Enrichment (AHE) genomic method in delimiting the species. I will investigate three different case studies under different evolutionary contexts: sympatric, allopatric, and parapatric speciation. As a case study in sympatry, I will use butterflies of the Polyommatus (Agrodiaetus) complex; for allopatry, several groups of alpine-arctic species of Lepidoptera, and for parapatry I will investigate butterflies of the Melitaea athalia/celadussa species complex. These case studies represent examples of long-standing taxonomic debates and I hope to resolve this conflict with the help of modern genomic tools.