Untangling the web of living things and the environment

Ecologists and evolutionary biologists discover principles that govern complexities of the natural world. That task is challenging and vital: the natural world is a tangled web of interdependence and increasingly shaped by anthropogenic change. Searching for principles requires using a combination of experiments, observations, and models to find robust answers to hard questions. Biologists at the University of Maryland are teasing out principles at scales ranging from virus infections to interactions between plants and their pollinators to the collective motion of animal herds. Our researchers use integrated, interdisciplinary approaches to address grand challenge problems, including those that span global disease, biodiversity, and ecosystem resilience. 

Our students and faculty conduct fieldwork here in Maryland, throughout the US, and globally, collaborating with colleagues to integrate data with experiments and advanced analytics to inform discovery, conservation, and management.  Biology research identifies how interactions between organisms and their environment shapes the fate of individuals, populations, and ecosystem functioning – and stimulates new challenges for methods development

Research Areas

Research in the Department of Biology spans multiple themes at scales that span cells, organisms, populations, ecosystems, and the global Earth system. You can learn about ongoing work and a selection of projects in the descriptions below.
 

Infectious Disease Dynamics

As global infectious disease persists as one of the planet’s most pressing issues, our researchers are tackling the ecological and evolutionary factors that drive the spread of pathogens. Researchers in Emme Bruns’s lab work in both Maryland and the Alpine region of Italy to study anther smut disease in wild carnations. Anther smut is a type of fungal infection that keeps the host plant alive but prevents it from reproducing. Their work is helping uncover how the disease spreads, but it also has the potential to untangle disease-host relationships in other organisms like crops and even humans. Researchers in our department are also concerned with the downstream impacts of how pathogens affect people, such as by infecting hosts in our environment. For example, Joshua Weitz’s lab models the links between viral infections in cyanobacteria and the carbon cycle, exploring how viral infections redirect the flow of carbon at global scales.
 

Evolutionary Pathways

Life around the world is constantly evolving, posing challenges like antibiotic resistance but also opportunities to find solutions and learn how and why evolutionary change occurs. Researchers in the Department of Biology study the pressures that lead to evolution, how resistance develops, and the process of coevolution. In his lab, Philip Johnson approaches questions in evolution using quantitative methods like machine learning. One of his focuses is modeling DNA degradation processes to reveal key steps in human evolution with ancient DNA. But our questions about evolution span the tree of life. Supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, Gerald Wilkinson’s lab studies bats. Their work has identified how certain types of bats have evolved to live longer and suggests that this change is associated with genes that play a role in immunity. 
 

Behavior, Migration, and Reproduction

Our researchers are dedicated to exploring the complexities of living, with ongoing projects that investigate how living things behave, migrate, and reproduce during their lifetimes. Scott Juntti uses the cichlid fish family, which contains over 2,000 species, as a model to study social behaviors like mating, aggression, and parenting. The family loves being social, even in the lab, displaying a variety of behaviors ranging from monogamy and polygamy to territoriality and friendliness. Eric Haag’s lab is also interested in fish— but specifically the mangrove killifish, which is one of only two vertebrate species that are able to reproduce asexually. This unique trait is helping researchers learn more about vertebrate sexual development and genetics.

Interaction

Encompassing a large segment of our work is a question at the heart of ecology: how do distinct species interact with one another, and what can we learn from it? Carlos Machado is interested in how the mutualism between the fig and fig wasp has led to coevolution. He was recently involved in a study that used field work in Central Panama to catalog how fig wasps interact with their host trees, finding that the wasps are likely able to recognize their preferred species. Julia Van Etten traces the genetic footprints left behind by ecological interactions. Her recent research focuses on the interactions between red algae and their surrounding microbial communities in geothermal habitats, such as in geothermal features in Yellowstone National Park, and the impressions that their inter-species cooperation has left on their DNA.

Quantitative Approaches

The Department of Biology recently launched its Quantitative Biology Initiative (QBI), which seeks to advance quantitative approaches to understanding life science through research, training and community-building opportunities for faculty members and students. Seven of our thirteen Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior faculty members are also involved in QBI. Quantitative methods help us answer questions not easily answered by traditional methods of study. For example, professor Vadim Karatayev approaches population dynamics using empirical dynamic models. Recently, he’s been able to study how climate change may throw relationships between species out of sync in large marine ecosystems. New faculty member, Jeff Maltas, combines experiments and models to explore the feedback between ecology and evolution in shaping the emergence of drug resistance in single cells, including fungal populations.

See also: Our Quantitative Ecology & Evolutionary Dynamics (QEED) Seminar Series highlights quantitative methods in biology through trainee-led seminars that act as venues for both brainstorming early-stage research and presenting polished work. 

Our Community

• Bely
  • In the Bely Lab, you’ll encounter science that might seem more like magic. Researchers study how animals, particularly segmented worms, are able to regenerate their body and reproduce without partners. Their work uses a variety of approaches, including developmental, physiological, molecular, and phylogenetic studies, to answer big questions about how animals build (and rebuild) their bodies in adulthood.
• Bruns
  • The Bruns Lab uses models of ecological and evolutionary change to reveal how pathogens and their hosts coexist, with a focus on how traits like resistance and infectivity rapidly evolve to impact disease dynamics. Their ongoing projects span several questions, including how age-related factors affect transmission and resistance and how heat-sensitive pathogens evolve in response to temperature change.
• Cummings
  • Researchers in the Cummings Lab address a wide variety of biological questions using data science methods like machine learning, description, hypothesis testing, hypothesis generation, prediction, and diverse statistical methods. Their currently funded research topics range from malaria antibody response in early childhood to the link between hearing and cognitive impairment in older adults.
• Fagan
  • The Fagan Lab interrogates fundamental problems in ecology and evolution research, such as how changes to the timing of biological events may impact ecological populations and communities. Additionally, they are interested in developing statistical and computational tools to unlock the potential of animal tracking datasets for answering questions about how wild animals use space as they feed, grow, mate, and migrate.
• Haag
  • Researchers in the Haag Lab investigate how one-parent reproduction has evolved in organisms like nematodes and mangrove killifish. These shifts to asexual reproduction present fascinating developmental puzzles, and researchers are working to determine the conditions required to allow self-fertility to emerge, along with the consequences of adopting it for reproduction cells, species behavior, and genomes.
• Johnson
  • The Johnson Lab integrates classic population genetics and modern machine learning methods to infer when and where populations experienced natural selection or demographic changes. By developing statistical and mathematical models, researchers investigate adaptive immune systems in vertebrates and microbes as well as key steps in human evolution.
• Juntti
  • How does the brain produce social behaviors, and how do they evolve? In the Juntti Lab, researchers focus on essential yet variable behaviors including mating, aggression, and parenting. Using the cichlid fish family as a model system, their work uncovers how neural circuits function and evolve to generate diverse social behaviors.
• Karatayev
  • Called the Quantitative Resilience Lab, this group uses nonlinear and stochastic dynamics, statistics, and AI to develop and test fundamental theories. Their work concerns how and why biological systems— whether that’s networks of species, bacteria, or neurons— are arranged the way that they are, and moreover how they can or cannot adapt to changing conditions.
• Machado
  • The Machado lab integrates evolutionary and functional genomic methods to uncover the processes that shape coevolutionary interactions, species divergence, and patterns of genomic diversity. Their work focuses on the mutualism between the fig and fig wasp, how gene flow and natural selection form new species, and the role of genetic inversions on species divergence for Drosophila fruit flies.
• Maltas
  • The Maltas Lab studies complex biological systems and phenomena like the evolution of resistance to chemotherapeutics in cancers and its resistance to yeast in fluctuating environments. Informed by quantitative approaches from disciplines like ecology, statistical physics and economics, the lab leverages quantitative methods to understand and ultimately control how these complex systems evolve.
• Weitz
  • Researchers in Joshua Weitz's Quantitative Viral Dynamics group explore how viruses transform human and environmental health, synthesizing theory, computational simulations, and model-data integration. This approach allows them to characterize environmental viral dynamics, advance the development of novel, viral-based therapeutics, and assess the link between human behavior and disease transmission as part of virally-mediated outbreaks.
• Wilkinson
  • Research in the Wilkinson lab addresses questions related to the evolution of cooperation, communication, and conflict at different levels of biological organization. They recently used machine learning to develop a biological clock based on DNA methylation for bats. They are also interrogating the sexual selection and behavior of stalk-eyed flies, resequencing the genome of a related species to determine their evolutionary history.
• Van Etten
  • The Van Etten lab works to uncover how horizontal processes like DNA transfer and organellogenesis arise from and create new ecological interactions, and how this affects evolutionary outcomes across microbial communities. Researchers use both experimental wet lab and computational approaches to better characterize the mobility of DNA between populations and across ecosystems. They are also passionate about coupling traditional, naturalist-style exploration and microscopy with genomics to identify new microbial species.