I am broadly interested in the evolution and ecology of open ocean ecosystems and species over long-time scales, as these are the scales on which species evolve and go extinct and ecosystems collapse and reassemble. Planktonic foraminifera, tiny protists with a calcareous test, play a central role in my research because they are abundant and widespread in modern and ancient seas. This is important as most inhabitants of the open ocean have virtually no fossil record. With foraminifera it is possible examine ecological and evolutionary dynamics across the broad range of times scales, from days to many millennia.
Research in my group focuses on understanding open ocean ecosystems through the Cenozoic (the last 65 million years), disentangling the causes and consequences of mass extinctions, and quantifying community response to global change.
