I am an evolutionary biologist interested in animal evolution and development. My background from marine biology and genomics allows me to study a broad range of animal phyla. Using imaging and sequencing approaches, I have studied several animal systems to understand the mechanisms of coral–algal endosymbiosis, embryonic axial patterning, and animal genome evolution. Toward the understanding of the molecular control of cell fates, during my first postdoctoral training, I studied stem cell regulation using single-cell transcriptomic and epigenomic approaches. My current research focuses on the genomic regulation of animal–algal photosymbiosis and evolutionary genomics of marine invertebrates.
