Message from Chancellor Fox: One of UC San Diego’s greatest institutional strengths is the breadth and depth of faculty research on a range of important topics. Each month, Chancellor’s Corner will showcase cross-disciplinary faculty expertise in a specific area. I invite you to learn more about the work of these scholars, and I hope you share my pride in their achievements and their contributions to society.

EVOLUTION

Neal Driscoll, Professor of Geosciences
Neal Driscoll is a professor of geosciences in the Geosciences Research Division at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. His primary interest is in tectonic deformation and the evolution of landscapes and seascapes. His work primarily focuses on the sediment record to understand the processes that shaped the earth. More…

Walter Jetz, Assistant Professor of Biology
Walter Jetz is interested in the way environment, evolutionary history and chance affect ecological patterns at the level of the individual, population and community, and how they combine to form patterns at the scale of continents or the whole globe. Recent advances in bio- and geoinformatics, ecological theory and data availability now provide an unprecedented opportunity to tackle broad-scale patterns from an individual, mechanistic perspective. More…

James Moore, Associate Professor of Anthropology
A biological anthropologist, James Moore works primarily on nonhuman primate socioecology--the interaction amongst ecology, social structure, and social behavior--and how the study of chimpanzee socioecology can inform us about early hominids. His current work focuses on chimpanzee adaptation to low population densities in savanna habitats, with fieldwork in Ugalla, Tanzania. Moore has also studied primate altruism and kin selection. More…

Kaustov Roy, Professor of Biology
Most of Kaustov Roy’s work involves benthic marine species (e.g., gastropods and bivalves) living in shelf environments, and requires the integration of ecological, biogeographical, paleobiological, and molecular data. The latitudinal gradient in species diversity characterizes most marine and terrestrial biotas, but the factors that control such gradients remain enigmatic. He is currently using marine mollusks living on the eastern Pacific shelf to examine the biogeographic and evolutionary components of this gradient. More…

Margaret Schoeninger, Professor of Anthropology
Margaret Schoeninger’s research centers on subsistence strategies with applications to behavior and ecology in anthropological contexts. She has participated in archaeological, paleontological, and ethnographic fieldwork projects in North America, MesoAmerica, Pakistan, India, Kenya, and Tanzania. Her laboratory analyzes carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen stable isotope ratios in various organic materials including hair, bone collagen and bone carbonate for diet and ecology reconstruction. More…

Katerina Semendeferi, Professor of Anthropology
Katerina Semendeferi's research interests include the evolution of emotional and cognitive processes in hominoids, and species-specific adaptations in the organization of neocortical and limbic areas in the brain of humans and apes. Semendeferi's work emphasizes the acquisition of new comparative data on the organization of the human, chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, orangutan and gibbon brain at the macroscopic and microscopic levels using non-invasive techniques. More…

Ajit Varki, Professor of Medicine;
Director, Glycobiology Research and Training Center
Ajit Varki is an expert in glycobiology, the study of glycans (cell-surface sugar chains attached to proteins and lipids) that have multiple roles in the development, organization and function of all organisms. A few years ago, Varki and his team identified a difference in a cell-surface sugar called sialic acid as the cause of a genetic mutation leading to the first known biochemical difference between humans and the great apes. Since then, he has published numerous studies regarding human evolution. In addition to his studies of glycans, Varki is the coordinator of an international Project for Explaining the Origins of Humans. More…

Christopher Wills, Professor of Ecology, Behavior, and Evolutionary Biology
Christopher Wills, an evolutionary biologist, is an expert on human and primate diversity, population biology, ecological diversity and the evolution of diseases. He has searched for the identity of “mitochondrial Eve” and the origins of human diversity and studied the evolution of the human brain and the impact on species of pests and plagues. His current work is focused on understanding the rapid evolution of genes involved with disease resistance and the role of diversity to protect against pathogens. More…

David Woodruf, Professor of Ecology, Behavior, and Evolutionary Biology
David Woodruff, an evolutionary biologist and conservation geneticist, can discuss animal species evolution and endangered species conservation. He is an expert on non-invasive genotyping and uses hair, feathers, etc. to make genotyping wild animals simpler, cheaper, and safer. Much of his research focuses on conservation of threatened species in the tropics, on genetic erosion in recently fragmented populations, and on the genetic management of populations in zoos. More…

** To learn more about other campus faculty scholars and areas of expertise, please visit the searchable UC San Diego Faculty Experts Database at: http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/facultyExperts/