Casey Dunn, PhD

Casey W. Dunn investigates the origin, diversification, and functional evolution of animal life. Dunn’s work focuses on deep animal phylogenetics, the evolution of complex traits (including the nervous system), and the morphological and genomic diversity of poorly understood organisms such as siphonophores. His lab integrates field collection, natural history museum work, laboratory studies of anatomy and genome function, and computational methods to reconstruct evolutionary relationships across the animal tree of life and to reveal how genomic and phenotypic variation arise and persist. A key emphasis is on developing open, reproducible analytical tools and advancing understanding of gene expression evolution and animal diversity patterns.

animal models ;  genomics ;  hardware design ;  neural networks ;  sequencing ;  software development ;  transcriptomics  

artificial intelligence ;  computational biology ;  development ;  evolution ;  genetics ;  machine learning ;  robotics  

Dunn completed his undergraduate studies at Stanford, his graduate studies at Yale, and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Hawaii. He was on the faculty at Brown for 10 years and has been back at Yale since. He is an evolutionary biologist with a special interest in the gelatinous zooplankton of the open ocean. His work integrates natural history, phylogenetics, development, computational approaches, and genomics. He is the Curator of Invertebrate Zoology and Curator of Informatics at the Yale Peabody Museum.