My research focuses on the evolution of color patterns in reef fishes. Coral reef fishes comprise one of the most colorful assemblages of living vertebrates. While reef fishes can simply be recognized as colorful anecdotally, color pattern diversity has never been quantified broadly across reef fishes. Color pattern evolution is a compelling system for understanding how biodiversity evolved in reef fishes because color traits are conspicuous and often indicative of different underlying modes of selection. My goals include quantifying diversity of color mechanisms and patterns, and applying phylogenetic comparative methods to reef fish color data to test multiple hypotheses regarding different ecological and behavioral factors within an evolutionary framework. The aim of this research is to determine which factors control observed levels of diversity in colors and color patterns at different comparative phylogenetic scales.
Curriculum vitaeA.B. in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, 2016
Harvard University
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A comparative analysis of color pattern across a family of reef fishes