1. Form/ function relationship of the teeth:

What does the shape of an animal's teeth tell us about what it eats? What does an animal's ecology (diet) tell us about its teeth? What are the dental adaptations  of a given animal that help it deal with the challenges of its particular diet? I study this relationship in living animals, and I focus on primates and treeshrews

• Dental adaptations in gummivors, the function of dental pulp, caries prevalence, dental topography, enamel thickness, the evolution of mammalian bilophodonty

2. Diet in extinct species:

Using methods derived from studying dental adaptation and diet in living species, we can reconstruct the diet of extinct species  

• The diet of plesiadapiforms, the diet of fossil treeshrews, the evolution of frugivory in primates, the origins of gummivory in primates and other mammals, caries frequency through time

3. Evolutionary developmental (evo-devo) biology of the teeth:

How are molar size and complexity (phenotype) patterned? What developmental mechanism (genotype) controls for these patterns? And how do differences in ecology manifest in different patterns of size/ complexity? What other organs develop in the same ways?

• The Inhibitory Cascade Model, the Patterning Cascade Model, morphology of the enamel-dentine junction