❝Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.❞
Theodosius Dobzhansky, American Biology Teacher, 1973

The various levels of biological organization (e.g., enzymes, organismal physiology, ecological communities) are influenced by and respond to environmental changes in different ways. My main research goal is to understand how such responses vary across species and environments, as well as how responses at a given level (e.g., physiology) may affect responses at higher levels (e.g., an ecosystem).

Some representative themes of my research are the following:

How do physiological rates respond to rises in temperature?

In ectotherms, the performance of physiological rates (e.g., respiration, photosynthesis) is typically a unimodal function of temperature. The shape of this relationship exhibits remarkable variation across traits, individuals, and species. To increase our understanding of the processes that introduce variation into the shape of physiological responses to temperature, I perform meta-analyses of large empirical datasets, accounting for phylogeny and key environmental factors.

Selected key publications:

• Kontopoulos, D.-G., Smith, T.P., Barraclough, T.G., and Pawar, S. (2020). Adaptive evolution shapes the present-day distribution of the thermal sensitivity of population growth rate. PLOS Biology 18(10):e3000894.
• Kontopoulos, D.-G., van Sebille, E., Lange, M., Yvon-Durocher, G., Barraclough, T.G., and Pawar, S. (2020). Phytoplankton thermal responses adapt in the absence of hard thermodynamic constraints. Evolution 74(4):775-790.

What are the genomic underpinnings of adaptation to diverse environments?