I combine tools from biology and biophotonics to understand the origins and maintenance of plant biodiversity. I primarily focus on fruit coloration, and am particurly interested in why and how plants evolve novel colors (structural colors), how those colors influence interactions between plants and their animal dispersers, and how fruit diversity varies across space and time. Seed dispersal is a critical stage of the plant lifecycle, yet has been understudied compared to pollination. Nonetheless, better understanding of seed dispersal has both basic science implications — for instance, in understanding the evolution of mutualisms and community assembly — as well as applied research implications — such as predicting plant movements in response to climate change and other human impacts on the environment.
In pursuit of these questions, I have taken macroecological approaches to describe variation in fruit color across space, macroevolutionary approaches to characterize the evolution of fruit color diversity, and biophotonics/optics approaches to understand the physics of novel structural colors. One of the fascinating things about biology is how there is always something new to be learned through applying new methods and through examining problems from different biological scales. Consequently, I am always open (and excited!) about collaborations across a range of biological scales to address fundamental questions in organismal biology.
Collections are essential to my work, and much of my research has made use of collections from a variety of herbaria (currently the Duke Herbarium, as well as BRIT, Kew, Fairchild, Queensland, the Australian Tropical Herbarium, and others) as well as botanical gardens (especially Fairchild and Kew). I contribute vouchers to the collections, and take advantage of historical collections to address questions about trait evolution and diversity. Without herbarium and museum collections, my research would not be possible, and their preservation is critical to biodiversity research now and into the future.
I completed my PhD at Yale University in 2019 with Michael Donoghue, worked as a postdoc with Stacey Smith at the University of Colorado-Boulder and Silvia Vignolini at the University of Cambridge and the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces. I am also a visiting postdoc in Sönke Johnsen’s lab at Duke University.