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RESEARCH INTERESTS

My research focuses on elucidating general ecological and evolutionary processes that govern emergent patterns in body size, community structure, and diversity.  To accomplish this, my research integrates over spatiotemporal scales examining the extent to which community-level and macroecological mechanisms are coupled.  The end result is a program that merges inductive and deductive approaches ranging from population, community, and experimental ecology to biogeography, macroecology, and modeling. As a model system, I focus on marine invertebrates and regularly on deep-sea systems.  The latter proves a fertile ground to develop and test ecological and evolutionary theory under the bottom-up dynamics of food limitation.  Examples of questions that I am interested in include:

1. How does energy-limitation affect biological communities?
2. How are varying ecological attributes of individuals and communities (body size, structure, diversity, abundance, biomass, and morphological disparity) coupled over these spatiotemporal gradients?
3. To what extent do local-scale processes generate global phenomena?
4. Are ecological and evolutionary processes passive or directional and what similarities do they share with nonbiological complex systems?