Institute at Brown for Environment and Society

Understanding the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that give rise to new species is one of the most fundamental and poorly understood questions in biology. As a budding speciation biologist, David interested in studying how the interplay between the environment, ecology, morphology, behavior, and genetics of species promotes species diversification and extinction. Currently, he's using the hog-peanut as a model system to test hypotheses about cryptic lineage diversification by assessing how the environment, geography, and genetics contribute to the classification of hog-peanuts as good ecological and/or biological species—all hog-peanut samples are currently being maintained in the greenhouse in IBES. David's speciation research is inherently interdisciplinary, allowing him to incorporate ecological, genetic, mathematical, and computational approaches, which leads to him being a good resource and potential collaborator for those in the IBES community.