Research
Evolutionary Biology
My overarching research goal is to understand how evolution works, and how it resulted in the remarkable diversity of living organisms around us today. For most of my career I focused on plants as models, but now my focus is on the origin and early evolution of life. My lab uses a combination of theoretical, computational, and experimental methods to understand how abiotic chemistry can give rise to systems capable of adaptive evolution and how these can acquire key characteristics of cellular life: cellular individuation and genetic heritability. This is a fascinating puzzle, with implications for explaining why cells are the way they are and what life might look like elsewhere in the Universe.
Education
PhD, Evolutionary and Population Biology, Washington University in St. Louis, 1991
BA/MA, Botany, University of Oxford, 1985