Lauren Sallan
Lauren Sallan is an evolutionary biologist and paleontologist whose research focuses on how biodiversity is structured across deep time. Her work treats macroevolution as a complex system shaped by ecological limits, extinction, and functional constraint, using the fossil record and living fishes to uncover general principles governing evolutionary pattern and persistence.
She earned her PhD in Integrative Biology from the University of Chicago in 2012. She then held a prestigious independent postdoctoral fellowship with the Michigan Society of Fellows, which included a faculty appointment in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. She subsequently served as the Martin Meyerson Assistant Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Pennsylvania before joining the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology to found the Macroevolution Unit in 2022.
Dr. Sallan received the Stensio Award for early-career paleoichthyology in 2015 and the University of Chicago Biological Science Division Distinguished Service Award for Early Achievement in 2018. In 2019, she received a CAREER Award from the U.S. National Science Foundation and became a Senior Fellow of TED. She is a two-time speaker at TED, and her talks on fish evolution, mass extinction, and paleontology have been viewed by millions worldwide.
My research path has been shaped by following big questions across fossils, living systems, and theory—to understand how vertebrate diversity emerges, persists, and transforms through time.
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Research Journey
My research has always centered on understanding how vertebrate diversity is built, reshaped, and constrained over deep time. I began my career fascinated by major evolutionary transitions—especially the move from water to land—and by the question of how new body plans and ecological strategies originate. Early on, I realized that answering these questions required integrating evidence that was usually treated separately: fossils for innovation and extinction, systematics for defining lineages, biomechanics for functional limits, and ecology for how organisms occupy space.
Although my early work followed traditional pattern-based macroevolution, I was increasingly drawn to mechanistic explanations—how functional constraints shape evolution, how ecological opportunity structures radiations, and how ecosystems reorganize after disturbance. These interests led me to combine approaches in new ways, linking early vertebrates to experimental biomechanics, trait data to developmental patterns, and systematic and phylogenetic information to ecological structure.
Over time, a broader structure became clear. Macroevolution is not a steady accumulation of novelty, but a cycle of ecological filling, disruption, and reorganization that recurs across vertebrate history. This perspective unified my work on mass extinctions, convergence, trait evolution, community assembly, and biogeography—all parts of the same question: how diversity arises, saturates, collapses, and re-forms under ecological and functional limits.
Working at OIST, with access to both fossil data and the remarkable biodiversity of Okinawa, allowed this integrative vision to mature. My group now combines biomechanics, systematics, population genomics, ecology, fossils, and modeling to study macroevolution as an emergent, multi-scale process. This perspective underlies the Diversity–Reset Framework, which views vertebrate evolution as shaped by recurrent cycles of innovation, constraint, ecological structure, and extinction-driven turnover.
My research journey has been driven by following questions across fields rather than staying within traditional boundaries. Paleontology, systematics, biomechanics, genomics, ecology, and theory are not separate interests, but complementary tools for understanding how vertebrate evolution works as a complex system. This integrative approach continues to guide the work of the Macroevolution Unit.
Research Unit