フリードマン ニコラス

I am interested in the origins of biodiversity: how did we get so many species, and how did they get to be so different from one another? My research focuses on reconstructing the evolutionary history of complex and elaborate traits, their functions, and their underlying mechanisms. In particular, I want to understand the origins of diversity in singing behavior and colorful feathers of birds, as well as the functional morphology of social insects. To accomplish this, I use an eco-informatics approach to classify animal behaviors in the wild, and a phylogenetic approach to compare hundreds of species in the museum.