Our research investigates the environmental, ecological, and evolutionary forces that influence speciation. It evaluates the relative contributions of microevolutionary and abiotic processes in promoting the divergence of populations, under the assumption that population divergence is the initial phase of speciation. From the perspective of population genetics, this could be described as an exploration of the factors that influence the formation of population genetic structure, while a phylogenetic perspective might incorporate an estimate of the relationships among the populations. From either viewpoint, a model of the historical divergence of populations provides a context for understanding how evolutionary forces that act within or between populations (e.g., selection, genetic drift, gene flow) ultimately produce macroevolutionary patterns. Research in our lab is a mixture of field biology, genetics, and bioinformatics. Please follow the links at the left to learn more about who we are and what we do.