What We DO

The Peterson Lab represents a diverse group of researchers and students. We do research the general topic of ecology and evolutionary biology across real-world landscapes, and so work in the fields of distributional ecology, biogeography, and systematics. Lab members work on topics as diverse as climate change effects on tick-borne disease, environmental physiology and genomics of duckweed, phylogeny and genomics of blackbirds, and the zoonotic distribution of the bacteria that cause leprosy. The group is highly interactive, and very international, and we literally work around the world on organisms ranging from viruses to elephants. A list of current lab members is available here, and a list of previous lab members (alumni) is available here.

The KUENM Group represents the combination of the Peterson Lab and the lab group of Prof. Jorge Soberón, as well as individual students and researchers from other labs around KU. The group is a "working group," in that its work centers around developing high-quality publications that address key points in the area of distributional ecology. A summary of the group's publications is available in its Google Scholar profile.