The Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Brown University shares a common interest in how organisms function, how they interact with their environments and how the mechanisms that sustain these processes have evolved over time.
Our work is directed toward understanding biological systems at the gene, individual, population, and community levels of organization. Major conceptual areas pursued by our department include animal locomotion and functional morphology, ecology of marine and terrestrial communities, conservation biology and environmental science, and population and evolutionary genomics. We study a wide variety of organisms - both living and extinct - spanning the tree of life, including microbes, plants and algae, marine invertebrates, terrestrial arthropods, reptiles, birds, and mammals, including humans.
The herbarium at Brown University has been a repository of plant specimens from throughout southern New England and around the world since it was established 150 years ago. It maintains what director Rebecca Kartzinel called “the physical record of a species in a particular place” — pressed leaves, flowers, stems, and sometimes roots with detailed notes about where and when collected. Click here to read full article.
New research analyzing the diets and microbiomes of 33 large-herbivore species in Kenya yields surprising findings about the interplay between animal evolution, behavior and the gut microbiome. Read full article here.
In a recent Science Magazine article about how life blossomed after the dinosaurs died, functional anatomist Amy Chew says even a recovery that geologists call "fast" took hundreds of thousands of years, and the world was never the same.
Study of wave turbulence suggests that highly mobile species and more diverse ecological communities may be more resilient to the effects of changing environmental conditions. Click here to read full article.
The muscles in bats’ wings are much cooler than the muscles in their core, a new study finds — and this research could one day enhance our understanding of human muscle. Read full article here.
