My lab seeks to advance our understanding of mating system evolution, and more broadly the patterns and causes of trait changes and their effects on diversification.

Mating systems have wide-ranging effects, including the their strong causal association with the magnitude and distribution of genetic diversity. Our work has long aimed to uncover both the causes and consequences of mating system transitions and the observed variation in mating systems within and between species. We are presently engaged in an effort to generate massively parallel sequence data for the inference of population genetic patterns and phylogenetic relationships in the nightshade plant family (Solanaceae). We continue to work on detecting and fixing the multitude of problems with macroevolutionary inference of trait evolution (Igic et al. 2006, Goldberg and Igic 2008, 2012).. One of the goals of this line of research is to properly order breeding and mating system transitions and ask how contrasting mating systems influence evolutionary fate of lineages.