Most of my website is designed for a specialized scientific audience, but it is important to include a summary for a general audience: taxpayers, colleagues outside of science, and so forth. Faculty members are responsible for teaching, research, and service; of the three, research may be the least understood (one common misconception is that professors only teach; we teach, but contributing new knowledge in addition to disseminating existing knowledge is also a major part of our jobs), so I start with that, though all are important. I also try to explain the unfamiliar parts of the job so you can get a sense of what I do. I am currently a full professor.

Research

A major duty of a science professor, especially at a research-intensive place like U. of Tennessee, Knoxville, is to expand human knowledge through her or his research efforts. I work in a variety of areas to do this.

• Species discovery: One area is figuring out how many species are actually present within a group. We often think of new species being discovered by, say, an astute observer seeing a weird fish in a market, or on an expedition to a remote area of the jungle, but in fact many new species are discovered as a result of data showing that what we thought was one species was actually two different species with limited or no interbreeding: see examples of tapirs or even African elephants. I develop some of the techniques we use to make these discoveries. This matters for basic biology: it is hard for scientists to communicate information without having names for biologically meaningful groups, and it is important to understand what leads to and maintains separate groups, but it also matters in the applied area: it is hard to conserve species properly if we do not recognize what they are (we might wipe out a species that we didn’t realize was independent, or might devote resources to saving a "species’ that is actually just a variant of a common species and lose another species due to finite resources).

• I also develop methods for looking at past history of life. For example, we have methods that can give information about how species have multiplied through time: do they exchange genes for a long time, has their population crashed at some point in the past, etc. This helps us understand how the current world came to be, but also may be useful in predicting what will happen as life and the environment continue to change.

• One major research focus has been developing approaches for looking at how and why traits change over time. For example, if you look in many environments you see more flowering plants than nonflowering plants like pines and ferns – why is this? Or questions like, once most of the dinosaurs (birds survived) went extinct, did mammals’ body size rapidly increase or was it gradual?

• One way I accomplish my research goals, as well as help others, is by writing software. It’s one thing to have an idea of how to solve a problem, but if you write a program to do this, then you and others can actually use the method to solve a problem. My software is free and open source. This means anyone can use it without paying me money (which makes sense, as my work has already been directly or indirectly paid for by taxpayers). It also means that anyone can look inside the software to see how it works. For example, here is an example of some of the code I wrote as a grad student; you can see how people have used it by looking at the hundreds of articles that cite it (though some are citing just the method, not using the software itself). Another important aspect of open source software is that not only can you look at it, you can build on it to make new software, without needing my permission, as long as you make it clear that you’re reusing my software, give appropriate credit, and release your software under the same rules (allowing reuse, showing the code, etc.). Building on others’ work, while giving them credit, is one of the key ways science advances. Making software open also lets others check for errors and try to reproduce studies.