I work on several interrelated questions that center on an interest in systematic biology. For example, how much do we know about the topology of the tree of life and how quickly are we learning? What, and how much, data are necessary to reliably infer species level phylogenies, particularly in the face of gene tree incongruence and ongoing gene flow? What are our prospects for collecting these data for non-model organisms? How does our knowledge of variation in threatened or endangered organisms inform our conservation goals and priorities?
News: I will be moving to the University of Hawaii at Manoa in January 2012 to start as an assistant professor in the Department of Zoology.
This video is a small experiment in visualizing the accumulation of genetic data across the tree of life. Here, I'm using turtles as an example. The tree structure is drawn from the NCBI taxonomy and the dots at the tips are sequences (red indicating mitochondrial, white indicating nuclear). The figures moving around represent authors adding each sequence to the tree. It was made by extracting the metadata from all turtle sequences in GenBank (publication date, molecule type, author, etc.) and then using these data with a repurposed version of Gource (a popular OpenGL-based visualizer for software version control systems) and ffmpeg to produce the animation.