research

The natural world is structured by interactions — between organisms and their environments, between species across ecological communities, and between evolutionary processes unfolding across deep time. Understanding how these interactions generate and maintain the patterns of biodiversity we observe today, and how they have done so across the history of life on Earth, is the central motivation of research in the Swain Lab.

We work across a wide range of systems and timescales, from the chemical ecology of plant–insect interactions in living forests to the functional reorganization of marine microfossil communities across ancient climate transitions. What unifies this breadth is a shared set of questions: How do species interactions structure communities? How do communities respond to environmental change — and how quickly? What are the deep-time origins of the ecological patterns we observe today, and what do those origins tell us about the future? We approach these questions using a combination of fossil and modern data, phylogenetic comparative methods, ecological network analysis, biogeographic inference, and fieldwork, often in close collaboration with paleontologists, oceanographers, ecologists, and evolutionary biologists.

A recurring theme across the lab's work is the value of integrating across timescales. The fossil record is not just a catalog of past life — it is a long-running natural experiment in how ecosystems respond to perturbation, offering baselines and context that no amount of modern ecological monitoring can replicate. At the same time, contemporary ecological and behavioral data provide resolution and mechanistic detail that the fossil record cannot. The most interesting questions, we think, sit at the boundary between these two perspectives — and that is where we try to work.