A major goal in conservation is to understand and halt the increasing rate of extinction that many natural populations face due to threats such as habitat loss and fragmentation, climate change, and disease. Theory and methods from evolutionary genetics have been key to assessing conservation status, identifying which populations are important to conserve, and aiding the preservation of biodiversity by informing our understanding of how small population size and loss of genetic variation impact the fate of endangered populations. Although conservation genetics has improved our understanding and ability to manage the current biodiversity crisis, increasing accessibility and application of genomics to non-model systems promises to improve our conservation capabilities as anthropogenic change accelerates. David is a PhD candidate in the Martin lab, in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, and has been generating and analyzing cutting edge genomic resources across space and time of critically endangered desert pupfishes in the Death Valley region. His work explores how demographic history, isolation, small population size, and genetic load interact to shape the genomic content of endangered populations and in turn, how we can analyze and interpret population genomic data to inform conservation management.