Kavanagh Laboratory

My interest in evolution and embryology extends to my long-time favorite beasts, the coral reef fishes.  With collaborators all over the world, I use field and lab-based studies of natural fish populations to compare developmental and growth rates of early life stages to assess patterns of divergence.  I am especially interested in temperature and latitudinal gradients that drive evolutionary divergence in these rates.  Understanding gradients and how developmental processes affect population-level divergence is a part of the big puzzle of how climate change might influence evolutionary patterns in the future.

I am also interested in musculoskeletal system trade-offs during evolution of body size, and I have projects which are analyzing musculoskeletal system growth and differentiation rate variation in divergent fish populations reared under "common garden" environments.