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

Climate change is among the most important threats to global biodiversity. To accurately forecast its impacts on the biosphere, it is important to develop a thorough understanding of current and historical responses of diverse biological systems to environmental changes.

Two major themes of my research to date are the following:

How do traits of ectotherms respond to changes in temperature?

In ectotherms, the performance of physiological, ecological, and life-history traits (e.g., respiration, consumption rate) is typically a unimodal function of temperature. The shape of this relationship exhibits remarkable variation across traits, taxa, and environments. To better understand how such variation emerges, I perform meta-analyses of large empirical datasets, accounting for phylogeny and key environmental factors.

Selected key publications:

• Kontopoulos, D.-G., Sentis, A., Daufresne, M., Glazman, N., Dell, A.I., and Pawar, S. (2024). No universal mathematical model for thermal performance curves across traits and taxonomic groups. Nature Communications 15:8855.
• 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 physiological, ecological, and genomic underpinnings of torpor in endotherms?