9602246 This award provides additional support for a BIO Research Training Group in the Analysis of Biological Diversification first established in 1991. During this course of this second award, NSF support will be phased out as other sources of funding are secured. The 24 member faculty group is drawn from 6 departments and 2 divisions at the University of Arizona. The funds awarded will provide stipends for undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral trainees, purchase computational equipment, and to bring investigators from other research and academic institutions to the campus for seminars. University resources will augment the funds provided by NSF in most of these and in other categories. Molecular, developmental, and population biologists, as well as systematists, ecologists and paleontologists, have developed distinctive approaches to the study of biological diversity. Owing to the way in which students have been trained traditionally, the connections among these approaches have not been explored in detail. While their individual research interests are as diverse as the list above, the faculty have formed this group with the aim of using phylogeny, which can be viewed as the history of diversification, as an approach to the integration of these disparate perspectives. ***
