Our interests are focused on understanding the biology of the genome itself, including mechanisms that mediate recombination, gene duplication and the evolution of novel functional elements. In the broad sense, my research is based on the philosophy that targeting studies to organisms with unique genome biologies (outside of the range of human or other classical model organisms) allows us to gain new inroads toward understanding aspects of human genome biology that might not otherwise be tractable. Ongoing studies extend this general philosophy and take advantage of the deep evolutionary history of key vertebrate groups (including lamprey, hagfish and salamanders). The unique selective pressures and functional constraints that these vertebrate lineages have experienced over deep evolutionary time have driven the evolution of diverse solutions to even the most fundamental biological problems.

Current research can be broken into three overlapping areas:

• Developmentally programmed rearrangement of the lamprey and hagfish genomes.

• Genomic reprogramming in the context of regeneration, in axolotl and other salamanders.

• Deep evolution and rearrangement of vertebrate genome structure.

• We are also committed to supporting the conservation of the species that inspire our work.