Biology faculty, postdoctoral scholars and students conduct research in four broad, overlapping areas:
Please explore each area below to learn more about faculty labs and research facilities, or view all faculty labs.
Study how bodies function at every level (molecules, cells, tissues, and organs) to help develop methods to treat diseases.
Our labs have expertise spanning various aspects of muscle physiology, feeding and locomotion, physiological ecology, molecular biomechanics, structural enzymology, and neurodegenerative diseases.
Seek to understand the inner workings of the cell, how cell fate is determined and how organismal complexity arises during embryogenesis and cellular differentiation.
Our labs have expertise in many approaches, including classical genetics, genetic engineering, molecular biology, immunology, biophysics, cytology, and bioinformatics. We employ these techniques in a diverse range of research systems that span the animal kingdom: nematodes, fruit flies, fish, chick, mice, and mammalian cells in culture.
Investigate the origin and maintenance of diversity across all levels of biological organization, from genomes to ecosystems.
Labs in our department have expertise in evolutionary genomics, invertebrate ecology and evolution, climate change, biodiversity monitoring, evolutionary biomechanics, ecomorphology, phylogenetics, evo-devo, and host-parasite coevolution.
Understand the molecular basis of organismal traits using a range of molecular genetic and genomic technologies, alongside computational analyses of the resulting large-scale data.
Research goals include understanding the evolution of adaptations and species, investigating why some individuals are vulnerable to disease, discovering pathogens based on genomic data and investigating the molecular nature of gene regulation.
Brooke Sienkiewicz conducts fieldwork in the Caribbean as part of her Ph.D. program.