Research in my group
investigates interactions among plants and other organisms as an evolutionary
game. In a game (e.g. checkers) your probability of winning the match depends
on your strategy, and the strategy of your opponent. If you think about
interactions in nature, these interactions really possess all the essential
features of a game: you have players (i.e. individuals of the same or different
species); a payoff from success (i.e. surviving to reproduce) and; strategies
(i.e. the genotype and phenotype of each player). Research in the lab tends to
focus on belowground interactions, but and can include any form of biotic
interaction from resource competition among plants or microbes, resource
trading among plants and mutualistic partners, or resources lost through attack
by enemies such as herbivores or pathogens. Research in the lab involves a
mixture of empirical and theoretical tools to explore questions. I generally
approach questions using three steps: (1) I like to try to think through how I
imagine the system works and describe all my assumptions and ideas with a
mathematical model; (2) It can be useful to check some of these ideas and
assumptions in the greenhouse with a model system. (The first and second step
may go back and forth for a while, depending on how wrong I was in the first
step.), and; (3) Once I feel like I understand the system I try to scale it up
to natural ecological systems (e.g. a grassland or a forest).