Research
Integrative Biology Across Environmental and Evolutionary Change
My research examines how environmental and evolutionary histories interact to shape complex organismal traits. I am particularly interested in understanding how organisms respond to changing conditions across biological scales—from molecular and metabolic processes to physiology, behavior, reproduction, and whole-organism performance.
I approach these questions as an integrative biologist, combining experimental, physiological, molecular, and computational methods across diverse study systems. My work incorporates transcriptomics, metabolomics, proteomics, lipidomics, behavioral and physiological assays, and environmental data to connect changes occurring at the molecular level with their consequences for organismal function.
Rather than focusing on a single organism or technique, my research is organized around biological questions. Current work spans experimental evolution in Drosophila melanogaster, environmental physiology in red-sided garter snakes, tissue-specific gene expression in coast redwood, and emerging projects with collaborators in biomedical and education research.
Evolution, Metabolism, and Life History
Evolutionary changes in life-history strategy can reshape physiology throughout an organism. I use experimental evolution in Drosophila melanogaster to investigate how selection acting on traits such as reproductive timing influences aging, metabolism, and other components of organismal function.
By comparing populations with different evolutionary histories, my collaborators and I can examine how sustained selection produces coordinated changes across biological levels. Recent work has shown that selection for early reproduction results in accelerated aging accompanied by extensive remodeling of metabolism.
I am particularly interested in using metabolomic, transcriptomic, physiological, and demographic data together to identify the mechanisms connecting evolutionary history to complex phenotypes. These systems also provide an opportunity to examine how molecular and metabolic trajectories develop through time rather than studying only a single endpoint.
Current questions include:
How do evolutionary trajectories develop across time and biological scales?
- How does selection on life-history traits reshape metabolism and physiology?
- Which molecular and metabolic changes accompany the evolution of accelerated or delayed aging?
- How repeatable are evolutionary responses across independently evolving populations?
Environmental Physiology and Climate Change
Environmental conditions can influence organisms at nearly every biological level. Much of my work with the red-sided garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis parietalis) has examined how animals respond to extreme and highly seasonal thermal environments.
This population experiences an unusual annual cycle: snakes spend many months underground at temperatures near freezing without feeding, emerge into a brief and energetically demanding reproductive season, and then experience rapidly changing spring and summer temperatures.
I have used behavioral, physiological, reproductive, and transcriptomic approaches to investigate how these animals function across this environmental cycle.
Thermal Biology
My research has examined both acute and longer-term responses to temperature, including thermal tolerance, behavioral thermoregulation, physiological responses to rapid temperature change, and transcriptional responses to thermal stress.
These studies help establish how animals currently function within their thermal environment while also providing a framework for understanding their responses to increasingly variable and extreme conditions.
Temperature and Reproduction
Temperature can have particularly strong effects during reproduction and development. I have investigated how experimentally elevated environmental temperatures influence pregnancy, reproductive outcomes, and offspring phenotype in red-sided garter snakes.
This work connects environmental change directly to organismal fitness by examining consequences for both mothers and their offspring.
Brumation and Prolonged Fasting
Red-sided garter snakes may spend up to eight months each year underground, near freezing and without feeding. Despite this prolonged period of inactivity and aphagia, they emerge from winter and immediately enter an energetically demanding reproductive season.
To understand how they manage this transition, I generated a time-resolved transcriptomic profile of liver and testis across brumation and post-arousal.
This work reveals that winter dormancy is not simply a period of uniformly suppressed biological activity. Instead, snakes undergo dynamic changes in metabolic regulation, cellular stress responses, energy substrate use, and reproductive tissue activity throughout the winter and during emergence.
Integrative and Multi-Omic Biology
Complex biological traits rarely arise from changes in a single gene, pathway, or physiological process. A major goal of my research program is therefore to integrate information across biological levels.
I use and develop approaches that combine genomic, transcriptomic, metabolomic, phenotypic, physiological, and environmental datasets. Time-series and experimental designs are especially important to this work because they allow us to examine not only whether biological systems differ, but how those differences develop.
This framework can be applied to questions involving environmental responses, aging, adaptation, experimental evolution, and convergent or parallel evolutionary change.
An important component of this work is also understanding how experimental design affects the biological conclusions we draw from high-dimensional datasets. Recent work in Drosophila has examined how biological replication and sample pooling influence metabolomic inference, helping establish practical guidelines for designing robust metabolomics experiments.
Emerging Research Directions
My research continues to expand into systems that allow complementary questions about environmental and evolutionary change to be addressed.
Current and developing projects include work examining how nutritional environments during juvenile development influence growth and adult phenotypes in Drosophila, developing transcriptomic approaches for studying biological responses in long-lived plant systems, as well as leveraging large scale distributions of animals in natural settings to better understand how environment shapes phenotype and organismal performance.
Across these projects, the central objective remains the same: to understand how biological systems integrate environmental experience and evolutionary history to produce complex organismal traits.
