Research Overview
Understanding biodiversity across biological scales
Life is extraordinarily diverse, but biodiversity is more than a collection of species. It reflects evolutionary history, the biological capacities and constraints that determine how organisms function and respond, and the interactions that connect organisms within ecological communities.
Our research follows these connections across biological scales—from discovering biodiversity and reconstructing its history, to understanding mechanisms of adaptation and biological interaction, to asking how species responses shape ecological communities under environmental change.
Our Three Research Pillars
01
Biodiversity & Evolution
Discovering diversity and reconstructing its history
We discover and characterize biodiversity using molecular and genomic approaches, from DNA barcoding to community-scale sequencing. In parallel, our phylogenomic research reconstructs the evolutionary history of insects. These directions now converge in our effort to integrate robust genomic backbones with dense species-level barcode coverage toward a species-level Tree of Insects.
02
Adaptation & Biological Interactions
Understanding the capacities and constraints that shape ecological function
Honey bees provide our principal system for investigating how evolutionary history, genomic architecture, physiology, social organization and microbial partnerships shape adaptation and ecological function. We ask how these interacting factors enable organisms to respond to environmental challenges, while also creating trade-offs and constraints that influence their evolutionary potential.
03
Biodiversity in Changing Communities
From species responses to ecological resilience
In Churchill, Manitoba, we are building a long-term Subarctic pollination research system that integrates biodiversity inventories, genomic references, phenology, field observations and molecular reconstruction of plant–pollinator interactions. This foundation will allow us to investigate how differences in species responses to environmental change reshape ecological interactions and ultimately influence community resilience.