Current Institution: University of Colorado Denver, USA
Research interests: I study how physiology and ontogeny limit the ways that organisms adapt to their environments. I am especially interested in using information about these constraints to better forecast how organisms will respond to global change.
Why did you choose to study your particular area of research?
When I started graduate school, there was a ton of evidence for frequent and strong natural selection in the wild. There were many studies documenting extremely rapid adaptation. We also all had learned the stories about remarkable cases of convergent and parallel evolution by heart. In a sense, it felt very much like evolutionary biology had moved beyond adaptationist speculation of earlier decades and provided strong evidence for the power of evolution by natural selection. Nevertheless, there were still countless situations where organisms seem to adapt to their environments quite poorly or not at all—even over extremely long timescales. So, on the one hand, we had abundant evidence that made natural selection feel all-powerful. But, on the other hand, we also had a lot of evidence that organisms still often don’t suitably adapt.
To me, these opposing patterns begged the question as to what limits adaptation in the face of pervasive natural selection. And, at the time, thinking about adaptation from a “constraints” perspective seemed to open up some interesting ways to think about many of evolutionary biology’s most exciting questions: When is evolution predictable? What determines species’ ranges? What is the role of phenotypic plasticity in evolution? How will organisms adapt to a changing world? I thought then, and still think today, that there’s quite a lot we can learn about adaptation by studying the situations in which adaptation fails.
What’s next for your research?
I’m broadly interested in evolutionary constraints in adaptation, and my research thus far have focused mainly on: 1) understanding how adaptation in the juvenile stage influences adaptation in the adult stage; and 2) understanding how physiological adaptation shapes animal mating dynamics and the evolution of sexual traits. I love these topics, and I hope my research on them has given us some insight into how the need to be a functioning organism across a variety of contexts restricts the evolutionary outcomes that are possible. My lab will certainly continue this work.
I recently started as a professor at the University of Colorado Denver, USA, and whether it’s the building where I work or my front yard, I can’t go anywhere without seeing the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. This has obviously gotten me thinking about constraints on adaptation to high-elevation environments. In addition to providing a local system where my lab can offer field research experiences that can accommodate students from all kinds of backgrounds, this topic allows me to simultaneously answer both fundamental and applied questions, such as the balance between adaptation and constraint, and the limitations on upslope migration in response to climate change. Fortunately, it turns out that my main study organism, dragonflies, are pretty well suited for studying these ideas because they’re strangely elevationally restricted as a clade despite having conquered just about every other environment (including saltwater!). Just in the year that I’ve been here, my lab has started to work a bit on this topic; and I am really excited about what the research has already uncovered and where we’re headed next.
Why are you looking forward to serving as an Associate Editor?
As much as I love doing and thinking about my own research, I also really love learning about what everyone else is up to. I know I’m a weirdo, but I actually quite enjoy the writing process myself and seeing how people craft their research projects into manuscripts. I’m most looking forward to hearing more about all the other cool research that’s out there and helping everyone else make the best manuscript possible out of their new work.
What submissions would you like to see more of? Any under-represented specific taxa / disciplines?
A well-conducted lab study is always fantastic, but I especially like it when people then follow it up and test if the patterns hold true under more natural conditions. With all the publicly available data out there these days (through GBIF and citizen-science platforms like iNaturalist and eBird) connecting hard-earned experimental data with data of patterns in natural populations is increasingly tractable. I’d love to keep seeing papers that emphasize the ecology as much as the function, and make connections between the processes we all document in the lab with the patterns we find in the field.
What advice would you give to early career researchers in ecology?
I cannot emphasize this enough: READ WIDELY AND CONSTANTLY!
READ NEW STUFF! It’s important to stay on top of your field, but it’s also important that you’re aware of what’s going on in other, tangentially fields. Being able to make connections to other topics, or even shift your research into different topics, will help you remain flexible as your research takes twists and turns.
ESPECIALLY READ OLD STUFF! Understanding the history of where your field has been is really crucial to understanding where it is now and why. There are also so many great hypotheses that have not been tested correctly or just fallen by the wayside. Reading “old” stuff can be an awesome way to kick start new research projects. It also prevents you from falling into that embarrassing situation of thinking you’ve come with a great new idea and it’s really just something that MacArthur or Simpson already said and did.
If there was one thing you could change about the field of ecology, what would that be?
I imagine this will make me sound like a luddite, but I think our field often gets carried away with trying to squeeze some cool new method into every question. We don’t stop to think enough about whether or not those tools are actually necessary for the question at hand or what they are really telling us about the natural world. Most of us got into this line of work because we were interested in nature; and I wish we all spent a bit more time letting our questions about the natural world dictate the tools we use rather than other way around.
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