Biodiversity and Biocomplexity Unit
Assistant Professor Evan P. Economo
Abstract
FY2013 was the first full year of operation of our unit at OIST. Our lab seeks to understand how ecological and evolutionary processes interact to generate and regulate biodiversity across spatiotemporal scales and levels of biological organization. Living systems are diverse from gene sequences to organismal morphology to communities and ecosystems. Our goal as biologists is not just to document and catalogue this diversity, but understand the complex interactions and dynamics that generate and sustain biological variation. The majority of research in FY2013 concentrated in three areas; our project on the evolution of the hyperdiverse genus Pheidole, and our “Global Ant Biodiversity Informatics (GABI)” project which focuses on compiling analyzing global distributions of past and present ant biodiversity, and initiation of a high-throughput ecological genomics pipeline to study high-throughput phylogenetics and population genomics. Other ongoing projects include biodiversity theory, 3D morphometrics, and complex systems research.
1. Staff
- Dr. Evan P. Economo, Assistant Professor
- Dr. Benoit Guenard, Researcher
- Dr. Béatrice Lecroq, Researcher
- Dr. Masashi Yoshimura, Staff Scientist (started FY2014)
- Dr. Georg Fischer, Postdoctoral scholar (started FY2014)
- John Deyrup, Technician
- Nitish Narula, Technician
- Masako Ogasawara, Research Assistant
- Cong Liu, PhD Student
- Hitomi Shinzato, Research Administrator