B.S. Biology summa cum laude, University of Akron

Ph.D. Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology, The Ohio State University

Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida (NSF PRFB)

The Folk lab uses a variety genomic and bioinformatic techniques to document the origins of plant diversity from evolutionary and ecological perspectives. Projects in the lab investigate plants at multiple levels of evolutionary divergence, from recent population splits to the deep radiations at the heart of today's flowering plant communities. Examples of current foci are interspecific hybridization, reconstruction of ancestral niche and species distributions, evolution of symbioses with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and automated extraction of plant traits from biodiversity literature. All the work we do takes place in a museum context, leveraging and generating herbarium specimens that document plant diversity in space and time.