Evolutionary Genetics - EG
Speciation Genomics

Colin Hughes

External Collaborator

I received a PhD from the University of Oxford in 1996, and I am currently Associate Professor in the University of Zurich.

I am interested in understanding the processes of evolutionary diversification across time and space, and in clarifying why some groups of organisms have more species than others; why some evolutionary lineages diversify more rapidly than others; what are the explanations for these imbalances in the Tree of Life; how does diversification differ between lineages in different biomes; and what can this tell us about historical assembly of biomes? My work focuses on the legume family, one of the most spectacular examples of evolutionary success in the flowering plants and one of the most economically important groups of plants. Current work focuses especially on mimosoid legumes and the genus Lupinus as models for investigating plant diversification.