Principal Investigator

I am a biologist with broad interests in the ecology and evolution of biodiversity, and how biodiversity intersects with technology and sustainability.  See my page for more.

Research Unit Administrator (OIST)

I was born in Okinawa but went to the United States to study American Literature with a focus on environmental literature. I wrote about the relationship between humans and nature by comparing the thoughts of great authors, artists, and architects. I also wrote about culture, language, and identity. The mixture of these ideas gave me the desire to return to Okinawa with the goals of spreading public education, preserving nature, and improving self-reliant economic development in Okinawa. I am overjoyed to have the opportunity to pursue these goals at OIST by using my past administrative experience to help the everyday operations of Arilab’s research.

Postdoctoral Fellow (OIST)

I am a researcher working at the interface between computer science and biology. I completed my PhD at the University of Sheffield, where I developed AI and computer vision methods to study biodiversity and evolution, focusing on understanding global variation in plumage colour and ultraviolet reflectance in birds.

After my PhD, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum in London and the University of Sheffield, focusing on segmentation, phenotyping, and developing open-source tools that make deep learning methods more accessible for biologists. I have experience working with diverse data types, including 2D specimen images, cross-sectional images (e.g. micro-CT), and 3D meshes.At OIST, I am working in the Arilab to generate fine-grained datasets from ant scans, such as part-level segmentations, and to explore new morphometric approaches for analysing phenotypic diversity.

I am passionate about learning new computational models and exploring how they can be applied across different types of biological data.

For more information, please visit my GitHub: https://github.com/EchanHe

Postdoctoral Fellow (OIST)

I am a natural history researcher interested in the evolution and diversification of life history traits of ants (social structure, morphological specialization, caste polymorphism, etc.). I am approaching this theme through fieldwork (observations and collections) and laboratory observations (observations and experiments with captive colonies). I describe the natural history of social and behavioral traits of ant species and discuss evolutionary history by comparing these traits.

From my undergraduate studies to Ph. D., I studied the life history of the non-army ant group of the subfamily Dorylinae at Kagawa University, Japan. I experienced fieldwork in tropical Southeast Asia, especially in Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam. During my master’s program, I spent one year at Chiang Mai University in Thailand as part of my Double Degree Program.

In the Arilab, I will combine my natural history research approach with morphology using μCT to investigate the evolution of complexity in insect societies by comparing life history traits, behavior, and morphology. Specific projects will include 1) hunting tactics of the genus Strumigenys with their mandible morphology, and 2) the specialization of the life history traits and morphology of Dorylinae army ants.

Research Technician (OIST)

I am an entomologist and evolutionary biologist interested in patterns of extinction and diversification in insects in deep time. The research areas I am most interested in include patterns and mechanisms of extinction in the fossil record, new methods for paleoecological reconstruction of extinct communities, and mechanisms and drivers of morphological stasis in deep time. The main goals of my research center on understanding extrinsic and intrinsic factors linked to large-scale dynamics of extinction and persistence.

My previous research focused on understanding extinction dynamics in ants during the Cretaceous as a function of their estimated ecologies, through the synthesis of fossil, phylogenetic, and morphological data. At OIST, I plan to continue synthesizing such lines of evidence and expand my research to assess a variety of drivers of extinction and diversification in the ant fossil record, including interspecific competition, environmental change, and assessing lineage responses to such pressures, to ultimately understand what factors underlie selective extinction patterns in insects.

PhD Student (UMD)

I'm Yaal (pronounced Yale), and I'm generally interested in how morphological and molecular evolution are impacted by habitat preferences and biogeography, especially among aquatic beetles. I hope to contribute to a modern systematic revision of the family Elmidae as a means to explore these broad questions, particularly as it relates to both the diversification and convergence of their plastron morphology. After receiving my B.A in Biology from the University of Rochester, I worked in the Brelidze lab at Georgetown University conducting cancer and epilepsy research from 2021-2023, then worked as a biologist at the Illinois EPA in the Surface Water Section from 2023-2025.

PhD Student (UMD)

I did my undergrad at the University of Minnesota. There, I undertook several research projects and acquired various skills and techniques. I started by investigating the ecology of ant-caterpillar symbioses as well as the dynamics of wolbachia co-infections in drosophila. I later went on to curate a library of calliphoridae COI sequences as a tool for species delimitation, and lead the de novo assembly of the Winsome Fly genome. For my PhD, I want to focus on resolving the systematics of overlooked ant taxa by integrating phylogenetics, phenomics, and biogeography to uncover their evolutionary histories.