About the PI

2014-2019     Assistant Professor in the School of Biological Sciences @Georgia Tech

2019 >            Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences @Georgia Tech

 

I am an evolutionary biologist broadly interested in the evolution of complex life. My Ph.D. training focused on the evolutionary stability of cooperation in the legume-rhizorium symbiosis. Here I developed new experimental methods to study how among-organism genetic conflict arises and can be mitigated. A similar evolutionary tension lies at the heart of all key events in the origin of complex life, termed the ‘Major Transitions in Evolution’: namely, how do new organisms arise and evolve to be more complex without succumbing to within-organism conflict? Studying the early evolution of multicellular organisms has been particularly difficult because these transitions occurred deep in the past, and transitional forms have largely lost to extinction. As a postdoc, I circumvented this constraint by creating a new approach to study the evolution of multicellularity: we evolved it de novo. Since founding my own research group at Georgia Tech in 2014, I have combined this approach with mathematical modeling and synthetic biology to examine how simple clumps of cells evolve to be more complex. Our research has shown how classical constraints in the origin of multicellularity –e.g., the origin of life cycles, multicellular development, cellular differentiation, and cellular interdependence– can be solved by Darwinian evolution.

 

At home, I raise two kids on a hobby farm (really just a big garden) with bees, chickens, a rabbit, a dog, and lots of edible plants. I regularly play in an an oldtime jam (I play ukulele or guitar), am in a D&D campaign (halfling ranger), and enjoy biking and hiking. Nothing recharges your batteries like being in an environment where you can’t tell if it’s the year 2020 or 1020 (i.e., somewhere in nature).

 

2019     NSF CAREER Award                                                                                        
2019     Sigma Xi (GT chapter) Best Paper Award (joint with Peter Yunker)                    
2018     Sigma Xi (GT chapter) Young Faculty Award                                                   
2018     Class of 1940 Course Survey Teaching Effectiveness Award                                       
2018     Visiting Professor at École Normale Supérieure, Paris (Mathematical Biology)         
2016     Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering                                            
2016     Named one of the ‘Brilliant 10’ of 2016 by Popular Science                           
2013     T. H. Huxley Award for Scientific Outreach                                                        
2011     Hamilton Award for best student talk at the 2011 Evolution meeting                     
2008    NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant
2006    NSF Graduate Research Fellowship