My research interests focus on the evolution and maintenance of cooperative groups, and why they don’t collapse in the face of internal selfish elements.
During my PhD, I used the leaf-cutting ants to explore these questions in the context of eusocial insect colonies, and I’ve recently joined the Griffin lab to continue this using planarian flatworms. Here, I’ll be utilizing the worms’ remarkable regenerative abilities, and their high density of adult stem cells, to explore how selection at different levels of biological organization interact, and to therefore shed light on the evolutionary origins and maintenance of multicellularity.
