research overview
- Dr. Manzitto-Tripp’s research seeks to understand how ecological and evolutionary processes shape origins of biodiversity and biodiversity distributions. In particular, her work emphasizes patterns that emerge from comparative analyses of species-rich lineages: such lineages provide repeated comparisons of evolutionary trends and outcomes, thus yielding predictive power regarding factors that constrain or facilitate the evolution of novelty (phenotypes, genotypes, distributions). Her research spans multiple time scales (tens of millions of years [between clades]; hundreds of thousands of years [sister species]), and domains of life (flowering plants, lichens). To achieve these goals, she draws from diverse sources of evidence including molecular phylogenomics, genetics, taxonomy, ecology, biochemistry, paleontology, anatomy, cytology, ecogeography, and climatology.