F. Keith Barker

I am interested in how evolutionary history has shaped modern organismal diversity. How much influence does past history have on character evolution? Does the original distribution of a clade influence its standing diversity? Do patterns of character evolution constrain or promote lineage diversification? All of these questions can be addressed using historical methods.

My research focus is on patterns and processes of evolution in a major vertebrate radiation—the passerine birds. This order comprises over half of modern avian species diversity, and exhibits remarkable adaptive diversity. This diversity lends power to comparative tests of evolutionary hypotheses, but also poses significant challenges. For instance, the comparative approach depends on knowledge of phylogenetic relationships—but until recently, much of passerine phylogeny remained unknown. Collection and analysis of large multigene datasets is helping to rapidly advance our phylogenetic knowledge, and this is a major focus of research in my lab. These data sets offer significant analytical challenges, and incorporating the most rigorous and appropriate methods is an important part of this research.

Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1999

Curator of Genetic Resources, Bell Museum of Natural History