Recognising overlooked diversity
Systematics & Species Discovery
Comparative morphology, diagnostic characters, taxonomic revision and integrative species delimitation.
Research
Integrating organisms, genomes, landscapes and deep time
Focus areas
Research themes
Each theme connects organismal evidence with evolutionary questions and geographic context.
Reconstructing evolutionary history
Phylogenetics & Phylogenomics
Evolutionary relationships inferred using multilocus and genome-scale data, with explicit attention to uncertainty and concordance.
Connecting lineages and landscapes
Historical Biogeography
Testing how vicariance, dispersal, climate and geological history shaped present-day organismal distributions.
Evidence from specimens and deep time
Collections, Fossils & Imaging
Connecting modern biodiversity with museum specimens, fossil inclusions, microscopy and non-destructive imaging.
Questions
Questions that organise the work
Projects differ in organisms, geography and scale, but they share a commitment to explicit biological questions and traceable evidence.
How does geography structure evolutionary diversity?
How can overlooked species be recognised?
What can low-dispersal arthropods reveal about deep time?
How can genomic, morphological and geographic evidence be integrated?
How can taxonomy contribute to biodiversity conservation?
Workflow
From specimens to evolutionary synthesis
Field sampling
Habitat, locality and specimen documentation.
Morphology & imaging
Microscopy, diagnostic structures and comparative characters.
Molecular data
DNA barcodes, multilocus datasets and genomic evidence.
Evolutionary analysis
Phylogeny, dating, concordance and biogeographic inference.
Open outputs
Publications, datasets, collections and conservation evidence.
Current directions
Projects applying this framework
Integrative Revision of Western Ghats Tyrannochthoniini
An integrative taxonomic and biogeographic revision combining morphology, molecular evidence and evolutionary analyses to resolve poorly known Western Ghats pseudoscorpion diversity.
Multi-lineage UCE Phylogenomics in the Western Ghats
A comparative framework designed to test whether different low-dispersal pseudoscorpion lineages preserve concordant geographic and evolutionary signals.
Comparative Tyrannochthonius Systematics
Comparative study of North American and East Asian lineages using museum collections, morphology, molecular evidence and phylogenomic approaches.
Western Ghats Tarantula Conservation
Field-based research supporting distributional baselines, habitat documentation and conservation assessment for threatened and poorly known Western Ghats tarantulas.