Sean A. S. Anderson

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Welcome to the website for the soon-to-be-opening Anderson Lab in quantitative biosciences at Georgia Tech. We are a group of evolutionary biologists and ecologists studying the processes that generate species richness. Our research focuses on speciation and the evolution of coexistence between close relatives, and a key aim of our work is to draw statistical generalizations about the hypothesized drivers of these two processes.

To this end, we develop new analytical 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 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.

I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Daniel Matute's lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I completed my PhD with Jason Weir at the University of Toronto in July 2022.

In January 2025, I will be opening my lab at Georgia Tech in Atlanta , where I will be an Assistant Professor in the School of Biological Sciences . I will be looking to hire postdocs and graduate students in the next few months, so please get in touch if you're interested in the quantitative study of all aspects related to speciation and biodiversity. Stay tuned for more announcements on this front.