Rate My Professor Rodney Dyer

Rodney Dyer, Ph.D., is a Professor in the School of Life Sciences and Sustainability at Virginia Commonwealth University, with expertise in Biology. He specializes in landscape and population genetics. Dyer earned his Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Missouri-St. Louis in 2002, M.S. in Biology from the University of Missouri-St. Louis in 1998, B.S. in Biology from Western Washington University in 1996, and A.A. in General Studies from Seattle Central Community College in 1994. Following his doctorate, he served as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Iowa State University from 2002 to 2004. Earlier, he was a Howard Hughes Research Fellow at the University of Washington in 1995. Dyer joined Virginia Commonwealth University as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biology in 2004, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2010, and to Full Professor in 2017. He has also held key administrative positions, including Director of the Center for Environmental Studies since 2017 and Interim Director of the Center for the Study of Biological Complexity from 2017 to 2018.

Dyer's research centers on landscape and population genetics, developing tools to assess how the physical configuration of natural and modified landscapes impacts genetic connectivity for native and introduced species. His work involves theoretical and empirical analyses of demographic and evolutionary processes influencing genetic variation. Key publications include "Putting the landscape into the genomics of trees: approaches for understanding local adaptation and population responses to changing climate" (Tree Genetics & Genomes, 2013), "Population graphs: the graph theoretic shape of genetic structure" (Molecular Ecology, 2004), "Two‐generation analysis of pollen flow across a landscape. I. Male gamete heterogeneity among females" (Evolution, 2001), "Pollen movement in declining populations of California Valley oak, Quercus lobata: where have all the fathers gone?" (Molecular Ecology, 2002), "Landscape modelling of gene flow: improved power using conditional genetic distance derived from the topology of population networks" (Molecular Ecology, 2010), "GeneticStudio: a suite of programs for spatial analysis of genetic‐marker data" (Molecular Ecology Resources, 2009), and "Not just vicariance: phylogeography of a Sonoran Desert euphorb indicates a major role of range expansion along the Baja peninsula" (Molecular Ecology, 2009). He has developed software tools including GeneticStudio and the R package gstudio for population genetic analysis.