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.

I pursue this by working across taxonomic groups (from bacteria and phytoplankton to birds and mammals), levels of organization (from molecules to ecosystems), timescales (from seconds to hundreds of millions of years), and by leveraging a wide array of methods (e.g., ecoinformatics, phylogenetic comparative methods, comparative genomics, machine learning).

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:

 

 

What are the physiological, ecological, and genomic underpinnings of dormancy in endotherms?

 

Many endotherms have the ability to enter dormancy (daily torpor or hibernation) in response to challenging environmental conditions (e.g., low food resources, extreme temperatures). To shed light on the underlying factors, I am combining approaches from phylogenetic comparative methods, ecoinformatics, and comparative genomics.

Selected key publications: