Carl Rothfels
Biology
Associate Professor
Contact Information
Office Location: LSB 332Phone: 435-797-1489
Email: carl.rothfels@usu.edu
Additional Information:
Biography
- PhD at Duke University
- Postdoc at the University of British Columbia
- Assistant Prof and Faculty Curator at UC Berkeley 2015--2022
Teaching Interests
Plant Systematics and Diversity; Phylogenetics
Research Interests
I'm an evolutionary biologist who uses phylogenetic tools to study plants. I’m fascinated by the patterns and processes of plant diversification, including molecular divergence, morphological change, speciation, and extinction. Much of my work focuses on the “seed-free” vascular plants—the ferns and lycophytes—two under-studied clades that are captivating in their own right, and that provide an important point of comparison for understanding the evolution of their relatives, the seed plants. Ferns and lycophytes are also an excellent system for investigating one of my main research questions: what is the evolutionary fate of lineages that have more than two sets of chromosomes? These “polyploid” lineages are common and often ecologically highly successful, but their performance over evolutionary time scales is unclear (and highly contentious). Since the mid-1900s, researchers have debated whether ploidy shifts result in lineages with higher diversification rates than their diploid progenitors. My research uses newly developed phylogenetic methods to address this question.