Research

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.