Research Overview My research historically centers on the taxonomy and phylogenetics of flower flies (Syrphidae: Diptera). Syrphidae is a highly visible, ecologically variable, and species-rich family of Dipteran pollinators. These qualities make Syrphidae an attractive family for non-specialists and citizen scientists, and my area of interest lies in creating tools to increase and facilitate the accessibility of this important group. Several of my publications are tools to this effect, including an open-access photographic key to the genera of Syrphidae of North America, a conspectus of the Syrphidae of Wallacea, Papua New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands, and a comprehensive field guide to the Syrphidae of Northeastern North America.
I am also interested in the evolution of the flower flies and other related groups of Diptera. I believe that flower flies represent an ideal model system to study the evolution of pollination behaviours in insects. As part of my doctoral thesis, I employed phylogenomic methods to reconstruct the evolutionary history of flower flies (Young et al. 2016), thus facilitating a better understanding of their phylogeny and providing a crucial framework for future ecological and evolutionary studies. Using the Anchored Hybrid Enrichment technique, I was able to reconstruct the first-ever subfamily-level phylogeny of flower flies based on phylogenomic data. My future work will involve using this phylogeny as a backbone to study the character evolution associated with the evolution of pollen-feeding in Diptera. I am also currently building on this phylogeny and expanding my taxon sampling outwards, to reconstruct the evolutionary history of the lower Cyclorrhaphan Diptera.