I am a postdoc (recently an NSF PRFB fellow; now a postdoctoral associate) at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

My research broadly uses phylogenies to answer evolutionary and ecological questions in a number of areas.

Evolution of nitrogen-fixing symbioses: I am involved in work using phylogenetic approaches and natural history data to elucidate the origins and phenotypic-ecological associates of multiple origins of nitrogen-fixing symbioses in the nodulating clade (>30,000 species, Fabales + Rosales + Cucurbitales + Fagales).

Ancestral niche space: I am interested in developing new methodologies for using niche models with phylogenetic and phenotypic information to answer questions about niche shifts in a quantitative framework. These include the frequency and tempo of niche shifts in deep time, and the projection of ancestral niche parameters onto estimates of past climate.

Phylogenomics in the Saxifragales: I am currently developing a large phylogenomic supermatrix to cover more than half of the angiosperm order Saxifragales, an ancient, isolated radiation of ~2400 species, integrating across newly developed target-enrichment data, mostly derived from historical specimens, and current DNA infrastructure in GenBank, SRA, and 1KP.

Hybridization: My PhD research organism is a model system for ancient hybridization, and still stands as one of the most prolific examples of historical introgression. I am using phylogenomic information and recently developed analytic approaches to detect these patterns of introgression and rigorously falsify alternative explanations for differing genome histories.

​Species delimitation: Phylogenetic and comparative research generally presupposes species boundaries are known, an assumption that can be problematic given the biology of organisms of interest. I have worked in "sky island" systems in Heuchera to elucidate species boundaries using classical taxonomy, integrative datasets, and modern model-based approaches to assess lineages.