Research

Major Research Themes:

Adaptive radiation
A population living in a complex environment might undergo adaptive radiation into a wide range of narrowly specialized types, or it might evolve as a few broad generalists. We performed a series of experiments using the bacterium Pseudomonas to investigate how specialization or generalization evolve.

Sex & sexual selection
The evolution of sex is one of the most fascinating problems in biology. I have written two books on the topic.

Adaptation to elevated CO2
One of the direct consequences of industrial activity is an increase in the CO2 concentration of the air. This affects plant growth and may have important ecological consequences. We have investigated how phytoplankton populations evolve in response to elevated CO2 levels in the atmosphere.

Yeast population structure
Baker's yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, is widely used as a laboratory model system. We have been studying its nearest wild relatives, S. paradoxus and S. cariocanus, in order to be able to use powerful yeast biotechnology to study natural populations

Plant species diversity
McGill has a research station in old-growth forest only 40 km from Montreal. I have conducted large-scale surveys and experiments there to investigate how species diversity is affected by environmental heterogeneity.

Neutral theory of biodiversity
The neutral theory of biodiversity states that major patterns in the distribution and abundance of ecologically similar organisms can be explained in a very simple way, by supposing that all individuals have the same probabilities of birth and death. This is sufficient to generate abundance distributions, species-area curves and range-abundance relationships closely resembling those of natural communities.

Antibiotic resistance
The evolution of resistance to antibiotics is one of the most serious problems in developing effective medical therapies. We have shown that resistance to a novel class of antibiotics, antimicrobial peptides, readily evolves in the laboratory, despite claims that it would not.