Alistair  Blachford

phone:  (604) 822-2645
fax:   (604) 822-2416
email:   
snail:  Zoology, Univ. of BC, 6270 University Blvd.,
      Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Z4

I wear a few hats:

  recent PhD in Zoology
Hopelessly generalist in my interests, but gravitate most toward evolutionary theory, and spatial ecology. My supervisor was Michael Doebeli.

Manager of the Zoology Computing Unit
Responsible for providing the computing infrastructure and services to catalyze the work done in this department.

Inventor, manufacturer and retailer
At dawn and dusk I'm the guy behind the BackUP, a sea kayaking safety device. See Roll-Aid Safety Inc.

Papers and patents:

  Blachford A. and M. Doebeli (in prep)  Reproductive restraint when survival is unlikely -- solving the puzzle of lemming cycles

Blachford, A. (submitted)  Small mammals in cyclic populations may forecast mortality rates using information from within their own population.

Chen, X., A. Schick, M. Doebeli, A. Blachford, and L. Wang (2012) Reputation-based conditional interaction supports cooperation in well-mixed prisoner's dilemmas. PLoS ONE 7(5): e36260. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0036260 PDF

Blachford, A. and M. Doebeli (2009) On luck and sex.  Evolution 63 (1): 40-47 PDF

Blachford, A. and A.F. Agrawal (2006) Assortative mating for fitness and the evolution of recombination. Evolution 60 (7): 1337-1343 PDF

Blachford, A. (1992) "Kayak righting method and apparatus",
U.S. Patent 5279248, Canadian Patent 2069399

Computer code:

  In Java, an individual-based simulation model of diploids with 2 alleles at each locus. Settable on the command line: population size, number of loci, min recombination rate, recombination modifier, assortative mating by fitness, forward/reverse mutation, selection, epistasis, and initial allele frequency. Description here. If you'd like the code, ask.

My recombination code went into the Nemo simulator because it was fast.