Projects

Active research themes and open databases.

Thermal tolerance and the limits of life

A central thread in my work is understanding what sets the upper thermal limits of ectotherms and how those limits scale with body size, cell size, and genome size. By combining experiments on fishes, fruit flies, and crustaceans with comparative analyses across hundreds of species, I try to find the rules that link physiology to biogeography.

I am currently particularly interested in the following questions:

  1. How does heat tolerance scale with body mass, cell size, and genome size in water- versus air-breathers?
  2. To what extent is intraspecific variation in heat tolerance shaped by oxygen and cell size?
  3. Can thermal death time (TDT) curves predict tolerance to ecologically realistic heat events?
  4. How heritable is heat tolerance, and what is its potential to evolve under climate change?

Repo: TDT_DGRP_lines Repo: Genetic_variation_TDT

Oxygen, body size, and hypoxia tolerance

Oxygen supply and demand are central to how animals cope with warming. Together with collaborators I work on how body size and cell size shape the tolerance of fishes and invertebrates to low oxygen, and how those relationships change with temperature.

I am currently particularly interested in the following questions:

  1. Why are large fishes more sensitive to hypoxia than small ones — and is this temperature-dependent?
  2. Which oxygen-sensing genes underlie variation in critical oxygen thresholds (Pcrit) across fishes?
  3. Do early life stages set the hypoxia bottleneck for whole-animal performance?

Repo: Hypoxia_tolerance_fishes Repo: Genetic_basis_Pcrit

Open databases for macrophysiology

Macrophysiology lives or dies on the quality of its underlying data. I lead two open, community-oriented databases that pull together physiological measurements at scales no single lab could achieve.

I am currently particularly interested in the following questions:

  1. How do metabolic rates of ectotherms shift along temperature, oxygen, and body-size gradients globally?
  2. Does erythrocyte size in fishes mirror body-size and oxygen-availability patterns?
  3. How can we make these databases reusable, versioned, and citeable for the next generation of researchers?

MetaR — metabolic rates ErythroCite — RBC sizes Organ-size DB

Reproducible workflows for physiology

Every paper I lead ships with a public, reproducible repository — raw data, R code, and the figures that made it into the manuscript. I’m slowly building tools and templates around this practice so that the next student or collaborator can rerun an analysis end-to-end with one command.

I am currently particularly interested in the following questions:

  1. What is the minimum scaffold a physiology paper needs to be truly reproducible?
  2. Which Quarto + renv + targets patterns are robust enough to teach in a one-week workshop?
  3. How do we make data publication as low-friction as preprint posting?

Template_for_publications ordenaR All paper repos