Research Interests:
I'm keenly interested to understand the multi-factorial dynamics of evolution. Ultimately the goal is to improve our ability to predict evolution. There are any number of brilliant groups working on system specific drivers of evolutionary response, but to develop general predictive theory we need to tie these pieces of information together. One of the main challenges to this approach is that as we add more factors to our models, we're making more assumptions. At what point does the effort to include more factors change our models from empirically grounded to pure conjecture? My work tries to combine theoretical, computational, and in vivo approaches to address these challenges. Some of my main research questions boil down to:
I'm keenly interested to understand the multi-factorial dynamics of evolution. Ultimately the goal is to improve our ability to predict evolution. There are any number of brilliant groups working on system specific drivers of evolutionary response, but to develop general predictive theory we need to tie these pieces of information together. One of the main challenges to this approach is that as we add more factors to our models, we're making more assumptions. At what point does the effort to include more factors change our models from empirically grounded to pure conjecture? My work tries to combine theoretical, computational, and in vivo approaches to address these challenges. Some of my main research questions boil down to:
- What affect do the interactions between factors have on evolutionary response?
- Can we better estimate the underlying parameters that are driving evolution?
- How many alternative adaptive trajectories exist, and can we predict this?
