Dr. Tonia Schwartz started her research career as an undergraduate at Iowa State University working with Drs. Bonnie Bowen and Carol Vleck using genetic markers to study populations of jays and to determine the sex of penguins. While doing a Masters of Science at University of South Florida with Dr. Steven Karl, she obtained a foundation in Population and Conservation Genetics while deciphering the population structure of gopher tortoises. Before starting her PhD she spent four years in Australia conducting research on diverse topics including fisheries management, speciation and hybridization, molecular evolution of metabolic proteins, and sexual selection. As a genetics PhD student at Iowa State University she was an NSF-IGERT fellow in Computational Molecular Biology, a NSF-GK12 fellow, and was advised by Drs. Anne Bronikowski and Jo Anne Powell-Coffman for her dissertation identifying how molecular stress response networks can diverge between natural populations of garter snakes that are at either end of the pace-of-life continuum. She was awarded a James S. McDonnell post-doctoral fellow in complexity science, which she took to University of Alabama at Birmingham to work in the Office of Energetics with Drs. David Allison and Julia Gohlke. During this time she studied transgenerational affects of stress on metabolism, reproduction, and longevity, and the evolution of molecular networks. In 2015 she was hired as an Assistant Professor at Auburn, and thus the Schwartz lab of Functional and Ecological Genomics was established.