MORPH
An NSF Research Coordination Network
Research Interests
My work addresses the evolution and classification of flowering plants, both their morphological and molecular characteristics. The generation of evolutionary trees for both genes and species is an important aspect of this work. Understanding the nature of evolutionary change requires not only a phylogeny of species, but also detailed study of development and the underlying genetics of the organism.
Current projects are 1) a molecular phylogeny of relatives of maize, sugar cane and sorghum; 2) developmental morphology and gene expression in unisexual flowers; 3) comparative development of inflorescences, and 4) molecular phylogeny of the grass family, the latter a combination of data from seven different genes, plus morphology.
