Today, there is a critical need for biologists to understand the interaction between natural processes that maintain biodiversity and anthropogenic changes to the environment. For many marine species, larval dispersal is the only means of maintaining genetic diversity among populations, and larvae are more sensitive than the adults to stressors, making them a conduit for environmental selection. Coastal ecosystems face a complex of stressors that span multiple temporal and spatial scales, from long-term global ocean change to localized episodes of coastal acidification, and larvae experience these multiple stressors simultaneously. Therefore, understanding how marine populations will evolve in response to environmental change requires investigating the synergistic impacts of multiple stressors across all life stages.

My research investigates how natural and anthropogenic processes affect the evolution of marine populations through the lens of larval dispersal. I combine laboratory multi-stressor larval exposure experiments with genomic surveys of natural populations, analyzing patterns of selection and migration in a geographic context using landscape (or seascape) genomic models. My lab also develops laboratory and bioinformatic methods to facilitate the use of next-generation sequencing in non-model species.