Our research focuses on the organismic interfaces between developmental, phylogenetic and evolutionary biology. Steady advances in the study of the phylogenetic relationships of organisms have provided the raw materials for critical studies of character evolution in plants, animals, fungi, and all other forms of life. Armed with hypotheses of relationships among organisms, we explore how patterns of morphology, anatomy, and reproduction have evolved through the modification of developmental processes. With each study, our goal is to reconstruct the origin and subsequent diversification of a clade of plants, and to generate explicit hypotheses of the developmental innovations central to evolutionary history of the lineage under study.