I have a longstanding interest in sexual selection, sexual conflict, and reproductive biology. Over the past few years my research has expanded, taking a more comprehensive and integrated approach to understanding my study systems' "unabridged" evolutionary ecology—and to do that one needs to know their study organisms well. Of course, this task cannot be done alone, so students and collaborators are the key to success.

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Knowing one animal well, across its entire range, turns out to be a surprisingly powerful way to ask general questions. Populations of a widespread species share a genome, a body plan, and a life history, but can experience climates as different as those separating distinct genera. That makes the species its own natural experiment: evolutionary history is held constant by design rather than corrected for statistically, so what's left is contemporary selection. And because populations are interfertile, we can do things that comparisons across species simply can't—bring lizards from opposite ends of the range into a common garden, separate what is heritable from what is plastic, and ask whether gene flow fuels local adaptation or erodes it.

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Currently we are working to understand the eco-evolutionary processes responsible for geographic variation in sexually selected colouration, body size, and sexual size dimorphism—and possible differences in age and ageing rates—in the wide-ranging Australian painted dragon (Ctenophorus pictus). Painted dragons range across more than two million square kilometres of arid Australia, spanning steep temperature and aridity clines, and we sample them along replicated north–south transects that let us ask whether the same environmental contrast produces the same physiological answer more than once. We are leveraging that variation to determine how thermal adaptation shapes selection and mediates physiological trade-offs between traits and between character states. Because these lizards live about a year, a single field season captures a whole cohort from hatching to senescence—selection can be measured rather than inferred. We conduct our research in the field and at UOW's Ecological Research Centre.

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We also maintain ongoing collaborations on red-sided garter snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis parietalis), which bridge environmental effects, sexual selection, and the costs of reproduction. Working in a second system keeps the dragon work honest: mechanisms that hold in an agamid lizard and a North American snake are unlikely to be quirks of either.

Our research uses an integrative approach spanning behaviour, physiology, genetics, and reproductive ecology to address fundamental ecological and evolutionary questions, such as:​

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• Sexual selection (from intrasexual competition and mate choice to sperm competition and cryptic female choice)

• Tradeoffs between pre- and postcopulatory sexual selection

• Oxidative stress and telomere dynamics 

• Energetic costs of behaviour and reproduction

• The evolution of sexually-dimorphic behavior and morphology

• The evolution of life history traits- especially physiological underpinnings of sex-specific and alternative reproductive tactics effects on ageing

• Thermal effects on the expression and the evolution of sexually selected and life history traits

• Intersexual co-evolutionary processes generated by postcopulatory sexual selection/conflict on genital interactions/function (and behaviors).

• I am also interested in "classic" ecology, e.g., the influences of predation, parasitism, inter- and intraspecific competition and niche partitioning on the evolution of my focal species across their range 

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