In brief
Sewall Wright divded evolution into two phases - variation is first generated and then sorted into the next generation. Selection, drift, and migration are the dominant forces in population genetics and act during the second phase. The twentieth-century was filled with advances in understanding their dynamics and interplay. However, all of these forces act on pre-existing variation, and so any process that biases the variation produced - the first phase - will also shape the course of evolution.
My research focuses on understanding how the structure and mechanics of developmental and physiological processes dampen or amplify genetic, environmental, and stochastic variation and channel their effects. These are part of Wright's first phase, and understanding how underlying sources of variation map to phenotypic variation is a driving motivation behind the resurgence of interest in synthesizing development with evolution. I work on several model systems including metamorphosis in Drosophila, galactose metabolism in budding yeast, and early embryogenesis in Caenorhabditis.
About Me
I am currently a postdoc in Alexander van Oudenaarden's biophysics lab at MIT. At the end of 2004, I earned my Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale in the labs of Junhyong Kim and Kevin White and did short postdocs with Mike Snyder at Yale and Dan Hartl at Harvard.
