My main research projects now concern the role of rapid evolution in the dynamics of biological populations and communities, the effects of environmental drivers (e.g., climate change, water pollution) on the prevalence, severity, and within-host dynamics of infectious diseases in corals, and the use of integral operators as models for populations structured by continuously-varying attributes. Students in my research group work on a variety of related and unrelated projects, ranging from the evolution of deceptive signaling in animals to the persistence of zooplankton in rapidly flowing freshwater environments.

I teach classes that bring modeling and mathematical methods into the biology curriculum. (1) Dynamic Models in Biology (co-taught with John Guckenheimer of the math department, and crosslisted in Math and EEB) is a computationally-oriented course designed for biology majors with no mathematics beyond the CALS college-wide requirement. Our textbook based on this course (Princeton University Press, 2006) is the first of its kind: a text on biological systems modeling aimed specifically at biology undergraduates, with all quantitative methods developed in the context of extended case-studies in biology. (2) Theoretical Ecology is a senior-beginning grad course, more focused on applications in ecology and evolutionary biology, and more math-intensive but also accessible to motivated students with only the CALS requirements. Both courses attract students from across the campus, including Engineering and the Veterinary School as well as CALS, Arts, and OUB biology majors.