Research Interests:
Recent actions in public policy such as the Final Report of the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy and the Kyoto Protocol are designed to identify and remedy negative anthropogenic alterations to the environment and to the species of the global biosphere. These polices are dependent on ground-breaking ecological and conservational research that reveals the wide-ranging impacts of industrialized life. However, most of this research has only emerged in the last two decades and remains focused on readily apparent biological indicators, and analyses of proposed conservation solutions often focus only on ecological/economic indicators. The swiftness and magnitude of anthropogenic ecological forces may have farther-reaching, long-term implications beyond what is already understood; altering ecosystems will influence the evolution of species contained within them, and applying conservation solutions without a complete understanding of the ecosystem, ecologically and evolutionarily, may doom our efforts.

Marine ecosystems, in particular, face a precarious situation: large social and economic needs for conservation, but limited evolutionary research on these unique systems. As the largest biosphere on the planet, the world's oceans provide many important ecosystem services, but complex trophic interactions, multipart oceanographic processes, and the potential for high gene flow (80 percent of all marine taxa have planktonic larvae) makes their evolutionary study a daunting task. I hope to combine ecological field sampling techniques with evolutionary lab methods into a research approach that can uniquely address the challenges of marine systems and to further the knowledge of the evolutionary consequences of modern industrialized society.