News

January 2025

Over five years of work on hornwort genomes published in Nature Plants! We discovered that hornwort genomes are more slowly evolving than any other plants, except for the accessory and sex chromosomes present in some species that rapidly evolve by accumulating transposable elements and heterochromatin. We also found genes that hint at the form and function of the first land plants. Read more.

October 2021

Edible Wild Plants of the Carolinas: A Forager’s Companion now available on the UNC Press website or wherever books are sold!

About Me

I'm a postdoctoral researcher working in the lab of Fay-Wei Li at the Boyce Thompson Institute in Ithaca, NY. I did my PhD in the lab of Lytton Musselman at Old Dominion University and at the National Museum of Natural History under Liz Zimmer. My work focuses on the genomics and evolution of hornworts (Anthocerotophyta), particularly the repeated evolution of sex and sex chromosomes in multiple lineages. I still do some work on systematics of the aquatic lycophyte Isoetes, particularly in the southeastern United States.

Over the past several years, Lytton Musselman and I have created cordials and apertifs from native plants of the eastern United States. To date we have over 200 preparations, and this work was featured on an episode of the radio program With Good Reason. Some of this work is now published in our book, Edible Wild Plants of the Carolinas, published by UNC Press in October 2021.

Polyploid Isoetes in Eastern North America

(Click for interactive map)