The Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience
Dr. Joseph Ryan has been faculty at Whitney Lab since 2014. Before that, he was a postdoctoral scholar at Sars International Centre for Marine Molecular Biology in Bergen, Norway and a research fellow at the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health. He earned his Ph.D. in bioinformatics from Boston University.
Allen Distinguished Investigator
Email: joseph.ryan@whitney.ufl.edu
The remarkable display of diversity in the animal kingdom is a result of hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary change. We combine experimental techniques, genome sequencing, and phylogenetic analyses to address fundamental questions about the sources of this evolutionary diversity in marine animals. The main animal models in the lab are ctenophores (comb jellies) and cnidarians (e.g., anemones, jellyfish, stalked jellies), but we also have projects involving annelids, echinoderms, ectoprocts, flatworms, and other marine invertebrates.
The Ryan lab is interdisciplinary and highly integrative. We combine genomics and phylogenetics with a wide array of other fields, including physiology, developmental biology, behavior, and neurobiology. The Ryan lab is highly collaborative, working with biologists from all over the world whose primary expertise is distinct from its own (e.g., taxonomists, developmental biologists, ecologists, cell biologists, phsyiologists) but share a passion for understanding evolutionary processes. This arrangement allows problems to be approached with a wide surface of knowledge and provides the shared language (evolution) to synthesize collaborative findings.
