About me

I’m currently a DECRA Fellow at Monash University in Melbourne, where I’m living with my wife and son. Prior to this I have also completed postdocs at the Natural History Museum in London (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship, Leverhulme Research Project Grant), as well as the University of Oxford.

I am a palaeobiologist fascinated by phenotypic evolution, phylogeny, Earth’s physical history and how it has all interacted to produce the diversity of life that we see around us. I have conducted morphological, phylogenetic and macroevolutionary studies on multiple mammal and bird groups, utilising a variety of analytical approaches.

My current research investigates macroevolutionary patterns of marine mammals, split into three main projects: 1) using adaptive landscape analyses to test the hypothesis (that I co-developed) that aquatic mammal feeding strategies form an evolutionary succession leading from terrestrial to increasingly more specialised, water-based feeding styles; 2) inferring the diversification dynamics of cetaceans using a Bayesian unsupervised neural network model, to determine the evolutionary drivers and their relative strength; 3) examining the sensory biology of toothed whales, primarily through studies of convergence and disparity of the inner ear.