About
I am a Professor of Palaeobiology at University College London, jointly appointed in the Department of Genetics, Evolution, and Environment and the Department of Earth Sciences. I am also affiliated with UCL's Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research and am a Scientific Associate of the Natural History Museum, London. Outside of UCL, I serve as Member-at-Large on the Executive Committee for the Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology. I am also a fellow and member of the programmes committee of the Linnean Society of London and serve on the editorial boards for Biology Letters, Evolution Letters, Palaeobiology, and Palaeontology.
I currently conduct fieldwork in the Cretaceous and Palaeogene of India and Argentina, but have previously been involved in fieldwork in Svalbard, Peru, Chile, Madagascar, and the United States. My main research interests are in vertebrate evolution and development, especially using cutting-edge imaging tools and 3D analysis to incorporate data from embryos to fossils to understand genetic, developmental, ecological and environmental influences on morphological diversity and reconstruct macroevolutionary patterns through deep time. I have previously focused on skull evolution in carnivorans and the marsupial-placental dichotomy, but lately I have been researching these topics all vertebrate clades, with a current project building an unprecedented 3D database of thousands of living and extinct vertebrates for the most comprehensive analysis of vertebrate morphological evolution to date. I am also currently working on the relationships and paleobiogeography of Mesozoic and early Cenozoic mammals, particularly focusing on Gondwanan eutherians, with a project uniting genomics and fossils to elucidate early placental evolution. As part of this work, I am involved in a project on the evolution of latitudinal biodiversity gradients in Cretaceous vertebrates.
Joined
December 2016
