Michael Travisano

My long-term research goals are in understanding the causes of biological diversity and complexity. While natural selection is the ultimate cause for both, that level of explanation is not sufficient to understand how the myriad forms of life have come to exist. My research program is essentially a series of studies of increasingly more complicated biological systems. By understanding more simple systems, we then work toward understanding more complicated, and realistic, biological systems. My first projects were with a single species of free-living bacteria, one of the simplest living systems that have biological complexity. Since those first experiments, my work has branched out to include simple eukaryotes, predator-prey interactions, and microbial communities, all of which was possible because of the earlier work.