Life as we know it today is the latest chapter of a story that is hundreds of millions of years in the making, and it is the result of biological drivers and environmental perturbation through deep time. Because of this, my research uses both the fossil record and neontological data to disentangle the evolutionary patterns that led to our modern world, with the general scope of answering the question: how did we come to be? Therefore, my research is at the interface of the geological record of life and the biological mechanisms driving its evolution and focuses on the tempo and mode of major evolutionary transitions of extinct and extant clades.  

My research includes 1) specimen-based research to track morphological, ecological, and functional transformation through time, 2) quantitative comparative methods to infer the link between geological and biological events that shaped morphology and its relationship to ecology, function, and behavior; 3) Evolutionary-Developmental Biology to infer the mechanisms behind the appearance of key evolutionary features using embryos of modern taxa within a phylogenetic framework and model evolutionary hypotheses applying a synthetic view obtained through the integration of data from embryogenesis and fossils. Indeed, while the fossil record is vital to conceptualize phenotypic transformations and the series of events that favored the origin and divergence of modern diversity, including extrinsic factors, the geological timespans over which the series of events giving birth and rise to major clades are recorded is simply too broad to approach questions at the mechanistic level, which is necessary to understand processes affecting anatomical transformations. In order to clarify how certain traits evolved, I study the plasticity of embryos and the developmental pathways characterizing them. 

Education

• Postdoctoral, Department of Organismal Biology & Evolution, University of Chicago
• Postdoctoral, Field Museum of Natural History
• PhD, Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences, Yale University
• MSc, School of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol
• B.S.,  Department of Geosciences, Universita di Firenze