Brian O'Meara Lab

I am interested in using phylogenetic trees to understand biology. New methods provide powerful tools for understanding the processes leading to extant patterns of morphological, behavioral, biochemical, and species diversity as well as various types of interactions. I have done empirical work to answer questions and methods development to create tools to allow us to answer more questions. I am working on a database of questions, methods, and software from comparative biology, genomics, and paleontology that use a phylogenetic tree and some data to address evolutionary questions. This database and its associated website, TreeTapper, will allow users to identify the optimal method and software package to address a particular question; developers will be able to identify questions for which there are no methods and methods that are not in software in order to find where best to put their efforts. I will then use this database to target holes to fill.

I am an assistant professor at U of Tennessee, Knoxville, in the department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. For more about joining my lab, or other opportunities in Knoxville, see here.

Some of our past and current research work includes: sequencing of multiple markers for inferring the phylogeny of Myrmecocystus honeypot ants, developing a method to test for different rates of trait evolution, investigating morphological and behavioral coevolution in Myrmecocystus ants, developing new methods for investigating discrete and continuous character correlation, developing a partitioned likelihood search program, analyzing supermatrices from Genbank, developing a joint estimator of species limits and the species tree, developing a method to test for different rates of gene loss, and more. See the Research page for more. Based on standard estimates of effort, our lab has contributed to the development of $1,270,496 worth of software (in expected development costs) requiring 23 person-years (these estimates are probably quite incorrect, but give a vague sense of effort -- see more info here).

Location and contact info are here. Browse the menu to the left for more info. Note that in areas that expand, you can click on the first name ("Lab", "Tutorials", etc.) to go to an overview page.

Nearby Great Smoky Mountains National Park (recent image) From NPS web cam on Look Rock