Evolution

Plant evolutionary ecology; geographic range limits and rarity; population dynamics and community structure.

Marine invertebrate zoology, protozoology, evolutionary morphology & phylogenetics.

Life cycle transitions of sexual eukaryote; Molecular mechanisms of nutrient sensing in phototrophic eukaryotes; Ubiquitin-dependent mechansism for chloroplast quality control; Evolution of developmental/epigenetic mechanisms; Macroevolutionary transitions from prokaryotes to eukaryotes and from green algae to land plants; Mitigating climate change by engineering algae for efficient carbon capture and biofuel production.

Plant molecular systematic and evolution; the evolution of asexual polyploid complexes in higher plants.

Ecology and evolutionary biology; the distribution of biodiversity and the challenges posed to its conservation through recent changes to the environment.

Genome evolution, polyploidy, duplicate gene fates and evolution, evolution of gene regulation, alternative splicing, non-coding RNAs

Speciation, domestication, conservation biology, and weed evolution.

Molecular phylogenetic studies of fungi and evolution of fungal life history stategies.

We investigate processes that underlie population and community responses to changing environments. Our current focus is on understanding and predicting community-wide responses to warming. We develop and test broad conceptual frameworks using laboratory and field experiments with insects and plankton communities. 

Early eukaryote evolution, molecular phylogeny, protistology.

Systematics and evolution of vascular plants, focusing on using DNA sequence data to infer relationships at deep and recent levels of seed plant, angiosperm and monocot phylogenetic history.

Spider systematics and evolution.