Research Interests
- Understanding the evolutionary relationships of ancient land plants, especially ferns and horsetails, by integrating evidence from morphology, molecules (DNA sequence data from multiple genes), and the fossil record. I use an explicit phylogenetic framework to examine the morphological evolution of various sporophytic and gametophytic characters within vascular plants, and to gain insight into the evolution of various life history traits and body plans that typify vascular plants.
- Integrating plastome, transcriptome, RNA-editing, morphological, ecological, and life history data, to yield new insights into the correlates underlying the observed molecular evolutionary rate variation encountered across the tree of life, especially in ferns.
- Examining polyploidy and apomixis in ferns. Systematics of cheilanthoid (desert) ferns.
- Recently pursuing a new research collaboration with Dr. Tomasi (Duke, Computer Science) and Dr. Meineke (UC-Davis, Entomology) to apply machine learning and computer vision algorithms to investigate long term insect-plant interactions preserved on digitized herbarium specimens.
- Strategic planning for collections-based institutes, especially herbaria.