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I am interested in the conservation, ecology and evolution of aquatic biodiversity. The effects of human development and recent climate change on our natural environment are pervasive and the threat these selective forces pose to global biodiversity is increasing. In my research I use genomics and transcriptomics to understand how populations and species evolve in response to their environment. I am particularly interested in understanding the relative contribution of plastic (environmental) and evolutionary (genetic) mechanisms in maintaining evolutionary potential of small populations. My PhD thesis explored these issues for southern pygmy perch (Nannoperca australis), a threatened freshwater fish from the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia. I am currently employed as a Postdoc at the Molecular Ecology Lab at Flinders University (MELFU) under the supervision of Prof Luciano Beheregaray where I am working on his ARC Future Fellowship project Ecological genomics of adaptation to environmental change.
-Brauer CJ, Beheregaray LB (in preparation) Anthropogenic habitat fragmentation increases extinction risk for freshwater species.
-Brauer CJ, Unmack PJ, Sasaki M, Beheregaray LB (in preparation) Comparative ecological transcriptomics and the contribution of gene expression to the evolutionary potential of a threatened freshwater fish.
-Brauer CJ, Hammer MP, Beheregaray LB (2016) Riverscape genomics of a threatened fish across a hydroclimatically heterogeneous river basin. Molecular Ecology 25: 5093-5113.
-Smith S, Brauer C, Sasaki M, Unmack PJ, Guillot G, Bernatchez L, Beheregaray, LB (in preparation) Latitudinal variation in adaptive resilience in an ecologically important aquatic species: a genomic test of the climatic variability hypothesis.
-Sandoval-Castillo J, Attard CRM, Marri AJ, Brauer C, Möller LM, Beheregaray LB (2017) SWINGER: a user-friendly computer program to establish captive breeding groups that minimize relatedness without pedigree information. Molecular Ecology Resources 17: 278–287.
-Attard CRM, Brauer CJ, Van Zoelen J, Sasaki M, Hammer MP, Morrison L, Harris JO, Möller LM, Beheregaray LB (2016) Multi-generational evaluation of genetic diversity and parentage in captive southern pygmy perch (Nannoperca australis). Conservation Genetics doi: 10.1007/s10592-016-0873-y
-Cole TL, Hammer MP, Unmack PJ, Teske PR, Brauer CJ, Adams M, Beheregaray LB (2016) Range-wide fragmentation in a threatened fish associated with post-European settlement modification in the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia. Conservation Genetics doi: 10.1007/s10592-016-0868-8
-Attard CRM, Möller LM, Sasaki M, Hammer MP, Bice C, Brauer C, Carvalho D, Harris J, Beheregaray LB (2016) A novel holistic framework for genetic-based captive breeding and reintroduction programs. Conservation Biology doi:10.1111/cobi.12699.
