Institute at Brown for Environment and Society

Colin is an evolutionary ecologist whose research makes use of large-scale eco-evolutionary field experiments to understand the causes and consequences of contemporary evolution. Much of his work revolves around lizard ecology and evolution in southern Europe, the West Indies, and North America. His past work has investigated drivers of functional trait changes in wall lizards in the Greek Islands, which led to an ongoing island manipulation experiment on the cascading ecological effects of lizards evolving in novel ecological contexts. More recently, he has worked on extreme climate events as drivers of micro- and macroevolutionary change, focusing in particular on anole lizards and hurricanes. While at Brown, he will be working with Tyler Kartzinel studying a species of lizard that has invaded cities in the Northeast US.

Colin earned his bachelor's degree in Biology at Carleton College in Minnesota before getting a M.Sc. in conservation biology at Michigan's School for Environment and Sustainability and his PhD at Yale's School of the Environment. After his graduate work, he spent three years as an NSF postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, the Natural History Museum of Paris, and Washington University in St. Louis.