About our research

Our research addresses issues related to food security amid changing weather patterns, the spread of diseases, and invasive species, with a particular focus on aquaculture and fisheries which support millions of jobs and generate hundreds of billions of dollars for the economy.  A puzzle in species management is understanding why, when the environment changes, that some individuals do better than others - even though they are all from the same species.  For instance, we can grow two oysters in the same place and one of them will live while the other does not survive - but then the next year something about the environment changes such as how salty the water is, and the opposite oyster will live while the other dies. The key to solving this puzzle is understanding how an individual’s DNA code - its genome - affects its survival in the environment. To solve this puzzle, our research develops innovative new approaches for big data that integrate ecological, genomic, and environmental data.  Food production can be improved if we more informatively match the genetics of plants and animals to the environment where they are grown. Our research develops and evaluates data tools and models to achieve this matching between genetics and environment, and we directly test model predictions in the field. Current projects in the lab are informing oyster aquaculture, seagrass restoration, the shifting distributions of marine fish, and the impact of an invasive fly on US berry crops. In addition, the approaches we develop are not specific to marine species, and are widely used for maintaining the sustainability of natural resources in both plants and animals.

We are training a new generation of marine scientists in these big data techniques, as well as field techniques in fisheries and aquaculture. To date, our lab has directly trained dozens of students at Northeastern University through paid internships and fellowships, facilitated training of dozens of student by developing a program to match them with labs that share their interests, reached hundreds of K-12 students in the greater Boston area through interactive outreach activities, and trained thousands of scientists around the world in data analytics through workshops, courses, and free online tutorials. Lotterhos was the leading investigator for the Research Coordination Network for Evolution in Changing Seas, a network of scientists across the US who improved research efficiency by sharing lab protocols, publishing data tutorials, and conducting syntheses on the current state of knowledge.

Technical description

We seek to understand how climate has shaped marine biodiversity and how a now rapidly changing climate will affect biodiversity in the future. This is a challenging goal, since biodiversity is shaped by a complex web of ecological and evolutionary processes that make natural populations hard to predict. To better describe complex marine systems and improve predicability, our research uses theory and experiment to inform each other and develops novel statistical methodology to integrate data across biological, spatial, and temporal scales. Conceptually, we are interested in how feedbacks between ecological (from abiotic to biotic interactions) and molecular processes (from DNA sequence evolution to expression and epigenetic modifications) can lead to rapid evolutionary change that in turn affects how species interact with their environment. We are interested in central problems in marine systems such as the influence of environment on dispersal, recruitment, and local adaptation - but we also study broader problems in molecular ecology such as the inference of loci under selection from genome scans.  To address these pressing issues in biological science, we use a combination of field surveys, experiments, mathematical modeling, genomics, and bioinformatics.

Funding sources