Research and Labs
Research and Labs
The Department of Biology strives to use an integrative approach to understand fundamental questions in biology. As such, six research areas serve as foci for interactions among lab groups and graduate training. These foci assure that researchers have the critical number of colleagues essential to form effective communities and that students are trained in integrative biology. The foci also cross-fertilize each other, as faculty and students commonly have multiple research interests. Several research areas center on the Tropics, as befits the department's setting in South Florida as the gateway to the Neotropics. For information on faculty research in each area, follow the links to the six research foci to the left.
Behavior and Behavioral Ecology
Research ranges from studying bee, bat, bird and primate behavior to understanding how behavior changes in evolution and how the environment molds behavior.
Conservation and Restoration Biology
Research studies invasive species, ecosystem degredation, and means of restoring ecosystems in an exceptionally wide range of land and aquatic environments, including the everglades, the Bahamas, Central and South America and Malaysia.
Research ranges from sensory physiology, aging and neuroendocrine function through axis and nervous system development and the cell biology of motility. Our current expansion is adding junior and senior faculty who ask basic biological questions using model genetic systems such as Drosophila, zebrafish, chick, and urchin, as well as several emerging model systems such as Mnemiopsis, Nematostella, and Parhyale.
Research ranges from discovering new species of both plants and animals to assessing taxonomy, the molecular genetics of evolution, environmental pressures on evolution, and changes in developmental programs implicated in evolutionary change.
Mathematical and Theoretical Biology
Research ranges from analysis and metanalysis to modeling of ecosystems, resource cycling, population biology, plant geometry, climate change, epidemiology, resource management, the mind and aging. We also have a collaborative program with the Department of Mathematics: The Institute of Theoretical and Mathematical Biology.
Research ranges broadly across major scientific issues in the tropics, with research projects on tropical botany, ecosystems, behavior, genomics, and faunal assemblages.
