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For updated research interests, please see my IRES page.
CONSERVATION BIOLOGY (see below for evolutionary biology, ethics)
My research will be focussed in two main areas: the ecological and evolutionary underpinnings of ecosystem resistance to invasions and infestations, and conservation planning for ecosystem services. (For project-specific and graduate student info, see also my faculty page at IRES.) Invasive species and population outbreaks of native species cost society dearly, and devastate ecosystems. Yet we know relatively little about how we can guard against these disruptions pre-emptively, bolstering the critical ecosystem service of infestation resistance. I seek a better understanding of this problem by incorporating the evolution of species interactions into models of ecosystem dynamics, and testing these predictions using empirical data (e.g., in collaboration with Daniel Pauly and others at the Fisheries Centre, using Fishbase and foodwebs created in Ecopath, EcoSim, etc.).
Ecosystem services are the benefits flowing from nature, which sustain and fulfill human life (e.g., flood control, water purification, pollination, food and fibre production, aesthetic and cultural values). Despite the obvious importance of these services, they have been neglected and abused because they do not generally get traded in markets (but see the Ecosystem Marketplace). I am working with colleagues at The Nature Conservancy, WWF, and Stanford to plan for these multiple services simultaneously with biodiversity protection. In this work, I will develop frameworks for such planning, and cement these frameworks in methods and tools, including computer applications.
EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY (see above for conservation biology, below for ethics)
My Ph.D. thesis was on the process of diversification. Diversification is interesting because it is the process that links the two subdisciplines of evolutionary biology: microevolution and macroevolution. Microevolution includes all the processes of heritable change within species; macroevolution includes the patterns of changes at and above the species level. Despite the fact that macroevolutionary patterns are abundant, and stem from microevolutionary processes, these patterns are used to test theories of microevolution only infrequently. There are a couple of impediments, but not insurmountable ones.
One impediment is that the predictions of microevolutionary models for macroevolutionary data are unclear. I built a model to investigate the crucial implications of a process that occurs frequently in nature (hybridization)--but is ignored in phylogenetics--for gene flow and phylogenies.
A second impediment is that the methods for assessing the relevant macroevolutionary patterns are insufficient. A crucial component of the identification of patterns is the comparison with what we would otherwise expect, given a null model of cladogenesis (the process by which phylogenetic trees 'grow'). My good friend Brian Moore and I have created methods for testing phylogenies for deviations from this model (see PAPERS, TALKS, SOFTWARE).
ETHICS (see above for conservation biology, and evolutionary biology)
While pursuing my Ph.D. in evolutionary biology, I also did ethics research with Peter Singer, partly through the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI) Science, Technology and Environmental Policy (STEP) program. In this area, there are a number of diverse questions that occupy my interest:
How can we make utilitarianism palatable? Utilitarianism is an important ethical theory. Many people, philosophers included, are drawn to it. Many others are repulsed. I believe that utilitarianism turns people off because of some unacceptable assumptions regarding welfare (what's good for us) and aggregation (how to combine the ethical importance of the welfare of different individuals). I've got a working paper in which I propose a theory called purpose utilitarianism, which seeks to avoid many of the obstacles facing other utilitarian theories.
What are our duties to future generations? Philosophers have struggled to put forth a theory of responsibilities to future generations that requires us to protect future people from harms and deprivations, but that doesn't require us to harm people who live today in order to create vast numbers of additional people tomorrow. It doesn't seem much of an ethical tightrope, but it is: current theories seem to fail in one way or the other. However, I believe that we can solve this fascinating problem, and have submitted a paper outlining my theory for how.
What are our duties to non-human organisms? Most people have the intuition that we have a responsibility to protect endangered species. And most people feel that this is because of duties to the species themselves. But--without appealing to duties to future generations--it has been surprisingly difficult to voice defensible reasons that we have stronger obligations to protect organisms of endangered species (like tigers) than organisms of common, weedy species (like rats). But I've got a theory that provides just such a reason, based on obligations to treat other organisms as they appear to "want" to be treated.