I am most interested in the relative roles of chance and necessity in evolution. There are two major research areas in my lab.
We are using the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and its relatives as model organisms to understand a variety of evolutionary processes, including questions about (i) mutation rate and spectrum, (ii) epistasis and fitness landscapes, (iii) gene expression evolution, (iv) expression plasticity in environmental adaptations, (v) evolutionary impacts of pleiotropy, (vi) genomic basis of adaptation, and (vii) phenotypic and fitness effects of synonymous mutations.
Using evolutionary, genomic, and/or systemic approaches, we analyze publicly available data to characterize and understand pleiotropy, robustness, epistasis, gene expression noise, posttranscriptional modification, convergent evolution, positive selection, origin of new genes, and other important genetic and evolutionary phenomena. We are not limited in the study organism in this line of research, but most often analyze functional genomic data from yeasts and mammals. Projects may also involve modeling and simulation.