Current
Threads I am actively pulling on.
- Apr 2025 — present
Emergence and stabilization of collective organization
Drosophila and experimentally evolved multicellular yeast as complementary model systems, read across developmental and evolutionary timescales; alongside theory for the evolution of complex multicellularity.
Past
Field programs and projects that have run their course.
- Jul 2021 — Jan 2025
Multicellular collaboration and biomineral morphogenesis in sea cucumbers
How syncytial cell collectives build topologically complex calcite skeletons — live imaging, EM, and models of self-closing active networks.
- May 2018 — Jan 2025
Trichoplax adhaerens: morphogenesis, repair, and size control
Scaling laws linking size, shape fluctuations, and splitting in an early-diverging animal with a two-dimensional body plan.
- Jun — Jul 2023
The tale of three systems — Chukchi Sea primary production
Arctic fieldwork aboard the RV Sikuliaq; a serendipitous find of kilometre-scale hyperuniform brittle star assemblages beneath the sea ice.
- Apr — May 2022
Project DaVINCi — diatom virus infection in the Gulf of Naples
Field and lab work on viral infection of natural diatom communities at Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, with Rutgers collaborators.
Misc
Tools, teaching, and applied work outside the main threads.
- 2019 — present
SQUID — quantitative imaging in low-resource settings
Open, modular hardware and software that lowers the barrier to quantitative microscopy in field and teaching labs.
- 2020
Centrifugal melt spinning for distributed PPE manufacturing
Rapid co-design of small-scale melt spinning to produce non-woven filtration media during the COVID-19 crisis.
- Aug 2023
Differential Geometry for Biologists — short course
A three-week graduate short course framing curves, surfaces, and curvature for biological shape and imaging.