Dr. Casey Dunn

Biography

Casey Dunn's lab studies animal evolution, with a particular focus on understanding the distant animal relatives of the earliest events in the animal tree of life. His research includes field work to collect poorly known animals, SCUBA diving, and remotely operated underwater vehicles. His lab bench work includes studies of anatomy and genome function. Dunn's computational work develops methods and tools for analyzing evolutionary relationships, integrating genomic and anatomical evolution. He coauthored a book titled 'Practical Computing for Biologists' to help biologists become comfortable with computational methods. Alongside studies of broad patterns of diversity among distantly related animals, Dunn's lab also focuses on siphonophores, a group of approximately 200 species of open-ocean animals including the Portuguese Man o' War, addressing fundamental questions about their structure, growth, diversity, and evolution. Dunn completed his undergraduate studies at Stanford University and his graduate studies under Günter Wagner at Yale University, followed by postdoctoral studies with Mark Martindale at the University of Hawaii.

Research Interests