My group investigates the evolution of animal coloration and morphology. What processes contribute to the extraordinary diversity of phenotypic traits in nature? We focus on birds – the most colorful terrestrial vertebrates. A fundamental challenge is that birds see differently from humans: they have tetrachromatic vision (four color cones) and ultraviolet sensitivity. To estimate a … Continued
I want to understand how plants will respond to rapid climate change at scales from cells to continents with the goal of building mechanistic tools to predict the future of Earth’s forests in the 21st century. The challenges of predicting forests’ responses to climate change based on fundamental tree physiology, while capturing the complex and … Continued
How do groups of individuals reach consensus about where to go or what to do? Collective decision-making is key to the evolution of complex social systems, including our own. Our lab conducts field-based experiments on wild primates to determine how group-living animals overcome conflicts of interest to achieve shared goals.
Understanding the relationships between individual organisms and their environment is a fundamental goal in ecology, which is all the more pertinent due to the unprecedented environmental changes underway. Research in our lab addresses the drivers of change in marine communities. Our research program is advanced by two complementary approaches. First, we combine field experiments with … Continued
My research seeks to explain the diversity of living organisms on Earth. Why do some groups of organisms contain so many species, and why do many other groups contain so few? Why do some groups have such tremendous ecological and morphological diversity, and why have other groups existed as “living fossils” for hundreds of millions … Continued
My research group uses the genomes of viruses to trace the evolution of major communicable diseases and to understand their origins, emergence and control. We have made seminal discoveries pinpointing where, when and how HIV originated and spread worldwide, and how influenza pandemics like the 1918 ‘Spanish flu’ emerge and kill large numbers of people. … Continued
My colleagues and I study the ecology and evolution of plant-insect interactions especially among the pollinators and parasites of tropical trees. Our work in Papua New Guinea engages indigenous citizen scientists in biodiversity discovery and rain forest conservation. Genetic studies of figs, mulberries, nettles, hops, and hemp aim to identify the mechanisms that produce and … Continued
I do interdisciplinary research in biology, applying tools from computer science, mathematics, statistics, and physics. I am interested in both theoretical and applied problems that arise from diverse areas of biology, including population genetics, computational genomics, and immunology. My lab works on deriving novel mathematical results on stochastic models of biological systems (such as mRNA … Continued
I am an evolutionary biologist who specializes in the genetics of ice age animals and plants. My group uses DNA recovered from bones and other remains to study how species evolved through time and how human activities affected this dynamic process. My PhD research developed tools to infer changes in species’ abundance and distribution from … Continued
I work on problems at the intersection of computer science, statistics, evolutionary biology, and genomics. My research has touched on a diverse collection of topics, including the identification of recombinant strains of HIV, the discovery of human genes, and the estimation of the times in early human history when major population groups first diverged. A … Continued