Question: What are you working to accomplish, and does your work hurt the environment in any way?

Melissa Wilson Sayres answered on 23 Apr 2016:

My main research questions are: how to sex chromosomes arise and change over time; how do mutation rates vary between the sexes; and how have the genetics of populations (especially humans) changed throughout history.

My research does not hurt the environment in any way, other than the energy needed to create the electricity used by our computers. In fact, however, we think that the environment may have led to the evolution of genetic sex determination, and led to different evolutionary pressures that shaped the genetic variants in our genomes today.