Research Interests

I am a general ecologist and evolutionary biologist whose research spans broad questions at the intersection of ecology, evolution, and biodiversity science. My ongoing research is centered on the following themes:

The biology of extinction

Why do some species survive environmental change while others go extinct? To tackle this central question at the interface between ecology and evolution, I use data science tools to weave together diverse strands of evidence—fossils, global wildlife surveys, and the tree of life. This is currently being conducted at the Swain Lab, as part of my Postdoctoral Fellowship at U. of Michigan’s Institute for Global Change Biology

You can watch me presenting the preliminary results of this project here.

Caption: A preview from some of my PhD results, were I estimated for the first time the spatiotemporal components of species persistence across the biota of Australia. Colder colors show regions that promote the persistence of certain organismal groups. I am currently preparing this manuscript for publication.

Speciation and the origins of biodiversity

How and why did life become so diverse? I address this question by exploring the gap between micro- and macroevolution and investigating whether processes within populations give rise to the structure of biodiversity across the broadest scales of time and space.

My work related to this topic was recently published on The American Naturalist and in Ecology Letters.

You can watch me presenting the preliminary results of a new project I am conducting on speciation, which I recently presented as part of the symposium “Cross-Disciplinary Approaches for Understanding Budding Speciation” that I co-organized with Bruno do Rosario Petrucci in the 2026 Evolution Meeting: link for the whole symposium here.

Caption: A research program aimed at dissecting variation in speciation rates across major organismal groups, which many hpothesize may be driven by a currently unknown, rate-limiting step of the speciation process. While comparative studies often focus on all species within a clade, an equally important pattern is the phylogenetically independent variation in speciation rates across lineages, as shown in Januario et al. (2025, American Naturalist). Figure from the introduction of my dissertation.

Comparative demography

How do ecological and evolutionary processes interact to shape a population’s ability to persist, adapt, and spread across space? Do these demographic properties vary among species at the same scale as their traits, or are they more—or less—conserved? Answering these questions is a central goal of my research.

My work related to this topic was recently published in Ecology Letters and in The American Naturalist.

Caption: Results from my PhD chapter comparing the metapopulation dynamics of bottom-associated fishes across the North American Pacific and Atlantic continental shelves. Metapopulation dynamics of whole fish assemblages differ between regions. Figure 2 in Januario et al. (2025, Ecology Letters).

New methods and software in Ecology and Evolution

Exploring new research directions often requires developing new methods to extract and organize information from primary natural history data. Furthermore, modern software allow us to ask questions at scales that earlier naturalists could hardly have imagined. I build tools that help turn those possibilities into reality.

To some extend I am always building new tools, but perhaps my most prominent published, standalone software is paleobuddy, an R ecosystem to research budding speciation which I co-developed with Bruno do Rosario Petrucci. We are growing this ecosystem slowly but steadily, so reach out if you have any ideas for collaboration.

Caption: Preview of an upcoming method that combines insular occurrences with geological data to quantify and compare species persistence across fundamentally different ecological contexts, illustrated using data for the eastern quoll (Dasyurus viverrinus).

Phylogenetic natural history

What does biodiversity actually look like when we step back and try to describe it in general terms? What are its most universal patterns, and at which spatial or evolutionary scales do they emerge? And why do these patterns sometimes change when we compare small groups of organisms to much larger ones? There are many of these fundamental questions on scale that deeply interest me and inspire the way I test hypotheses about the natural world.

Caption: Molecular phylogenies of virtually all well-known organisms on Earth become more imbalanced (asymmetric) as we include broader and broader organismal groups. The causes of this extremely consistent pattern remains unknown to scientists. Figure from my dissertation introduction.

The evolution of complexity

How does the co-variation among traits change over time? And how important are those changes for shaping the diversity of life we see today?

My work on this topic is still in progress, but my recent review of the MIT Press Evolvability book provides a glimpse into how I approach these questions.

Caption: This figure shows how traits change over time within species (colored polygons) belonging to the same fossil genus. The primary data for this project was concluded and the analysis is ongoing.