Event
Abstract: As anthropogenic activities continue and intensify, biological systems are increasingly exposed to rapidly changing, non-analogous environmental conditions, including structural and climatic stressors that act concurrently. These novel stressors trigger responses across multiple levels of biological organization and operate at varying temporal and spatial scales. My research integrates ecology, organismal biology, and evolutionary biology to investigate the mechanisms underlying responses to anthropogenic pressures, while examining how these responses ripple across biological scales.
My work spans a diverse range of taxa and blends macro- and micro- evolutionary perspectives. I aim to understand how past evolutionary history, coupled with bouts of structural genome evolution, influences species' evolvability in the face of urbanization and climate change. At a macroevolutionary scale, my ongoing research on lungless salamanders, insects, and fishes explores the evolutionary constraints that shape contemporary responses to human-induced environmental changes. Using these systems, I also develop novel methods to assess the evolution of ecological niche lability and species' adaptive potential within human-altered landscapes. In parallel, I build local, regional, and global study systems to investigate the interactions between the genomic architecture of traits and the spatial and temporal dynamics of environmental variation. By combining these insights, I uncover the mechanisms that govern species survival and persistence in human-modified landscapes.