Nature offers endless chances to inspire awe, and none of my most thrilling discoveries are planned. We strive to provide a supportive lab environment where everyone can find their eureka moment. The main interest of our group is to characterize the pattern and process of flowering plant diversity. The lab currently focuses on the parasitic plant system, but students and postdoctoral fellows are strongly encouraged to develop their own empirical system and computational projects in the general area of systematics and evolutionary genomics.

Parasitism and interaction

Parasitism has evolved a dozen times in flowering plants, involving remarkable modifications in physiology and morphology. Using the broomrape family Orobanchaceae as a model, we address multiple fundamental questions in evolutionary biology including ecological speciation, genomic modification, morphological adaptation,​ species interaction, and global change. We integrate insights from systematics, comparative genomics, physiology, and collection-based sciences to build a comprehensive understanding towards how plants adapt to a heterotrophic life. In particular, we explore how parasitism impact (1) the dispersal and cladogenesis, (2) resource allocation in leaves and seeds, (3) nuclear and organellar genome evolution in Orobanchaceae.

Chance and necessity

Over and over gain, we see convergence in nature. How randomness and selection influence evolutionary process is a fascinating question and a core pursuit of our lab. We use parasitic plants as a model to investigate the predictability of evolution and the underlying mechanism. Is parasitism an evolutionary dead-end? Do parasitic plants end up with similar gene repertoire? Do they converge on pollination syndromes?

Diversity and phylogeny of plants

The phylogeny of flowering plants remains a huge puzzle due to incomplete lineage sorting, gene duplication, and horizontal events. We contribute to a better Tree of Life by developing novel and rigorous phylogenomic methods. We also collaborate extensively with scientists worldwide to explore the "dark matter" of unknown taxa on the Tree of Life by extensive fieldwork and collection-based sciences. These new lineages often challenge the support for important parts of the tree, and also hold keys to reconstructing major evolutionary events.