Research Interests (300 words)
My research has been on taxonomy and systematics of plant groups between the New and Old Worlds, and the questions I am trying to answer relate to how many species there are in a specific group of plants in the Old and New Worlds respectively, how these species are related, why there are more species in one or the other region, and how these species formed their distribution between the two continents. These work involves using both morphological and molecular data. Morphological data can be qualitative (e.g., leaf shape, flower color) or quantitative (e.g., leaf size, number of flowers per inflorescence, number of seeds in a fruit). Molecular data can be a small piece of DNA or the entire genome.