The Anderson Lab at Georgia Tech

Welcome to the Anderson Lab at Georgia Tech! We are a research group studying the evolutionary origins of biodiversity.

Our work is primarily organized around trying to better understand two key processes critical to the build-up of species richness: (1) speciation and (2) the evolution of coexistence between close relatives. A principle aim of our work is to draw statistical generalizations about the hypothesized drivers of these two processes.

To these ends, we develop new quantitative tools to address fundamental questions like "is ecology-based divergent selection generally required for speciation?" and "do the processes promoting coexstence tend to differ across environments?". We deploy these and other tools to study various aspects of the ecology and evolution of real organisms using genomic and trait data that we collect from the field, lab, and from museum specimens. We are particularly interested in diversification dynamics of non-model systems — lineages that evolve and speciate in the complex continental settings home to most of life.

Our work is question-driven, and as such, we are open to working with virtually any study system that can help provide missing insight. Research to-date has focused on birds, terrestrial vertebrates, and wild Drosophila species pairs, though we are always on the lookout for new and interesting systems that can help shed light on unanswered questions surrounding the origins of biodiversity.

Our lab is housed at Georgia Tech's main campus in Atlanta — the Capital of the South and one of the most vibrant and interesting cities in the USA. I am currently accepting applications for postdocs and graduate students , so please get in touch if you're interested in the quantitative study of all aspects related to speciation and biodiversity. Prospective PhD students can apply through one of three graduate programs at Georgia Tech: biological sciences, bioinformatics, or quantitative biosciences (QBios).