
Matthew Pennell
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Email
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Office phone
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Research areaEvolution
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Lab members
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History
Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Biodiversity Theory and Informatics
Affiliate Professor, Department of Statistics
Associate Member, Department of Botany
Izaak Killam Memorial and NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow, UBC| July 2015 - July 2016
Ph.D. Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, University of Idaho | May 2015
B.Sc. (Honours) Biological Sciences, Simon Fraser University | May 2010
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.