Matthew Pennell

I am fascinated by life’s variety and seek general explanations for how it arose and how it is maintained. A basic premise of my research is that these two aims are interdependent: what we see today is the result of ecological and evolutionary processes operating in concert across ‘deep time’. In my research, I build theory, statistical methods, and computational tools to investigate how the interactions of these processes have played out over history. I have a particular fondness for phylogenetic trees, the historical pattern of branching that connects organisms to one another, and work to understand what these can tell us about the long-term dynamics of evolutionary change. To complement this work, I also develop general informatics tools for handling, manipulating, and sharing biodiversity data.

Current projects in my group include:

• Reconciling rates of evolutionary change measured across different time scales
• Measuring macroevolutionary rates for complex phenotypes, such as reaction norms and gene expression
• Constructing ecological models for adaptive radiation
• Developing a graphical framework for causal inference in comparative biology

You can check out past and ongoing projects on my GitHub page.