What does this lab work on? [this is out of date, being revised]

A phylogenetically diverse assemblage of studies of diversity - how are species distributed, how are alleles within species distributed, how do these patterns relate to one another? In some ways it is ecology - the distribution and abundance of cell types in a developing functional organ, the variation in abundance of microbes in coral mucus, the interaction of epibiont life history with the distribution and abundance of hosts. In some ways we do genetics - at least, we study how heritable variation can distinguish parasite from host, how organisms move through the environment using DNA as a tracking device, or whether a trait is environmental or genetically determined.

And in most cases, the organism we work on is wet. Marine, freshwater, salt marsh, they’re all just fine. The terrestrial organisms? They're fine too!

Much of our work is geographic in nature. Understanding the mechanisms that maintain diversity and limit the distribution of organisms is fundamental to explaining global patterns that exist in marine communities, and how these patterns will change with the climate. Working with Jamie Pringle and Jeb Byers, we have two audacious tasks ahead of us: gleaning distributional and life history data from the literature and extant databases to build a matrix of population and species ranges for the western Atlantic Ocean, and using these data to parameterize and extend our theoretical work on the selective and competitive differential needed to maintain range limits among and within (in the case of alleles) species distributions.

The most recent publications from this work: