I’m Mark and I’m a paleobiologist, evolutionary biologist and educator currently doing a postdoc at Stanford University.
A lil journey
I grew up hanging out among the temperate eucalyptus forests of southeastern Australia, before moving to Naarm/Melbourne (on the land of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Boon Wurrung Bunurong peoples of the eastern Kulin Nations) to study zoology at Monash University.
After uni, I worked in the collections and as a research assistant at the Melbourne Museum.
In 2020 I moved to New York (a fun time to be moving across the globe) to begin my PhD in paleobiology through the Richard Gilder Graduate School at the American Museum of Natural History.
After graduating from my PhD at the end of 2024 and a short postdoc there, I moved to San Francisco to start a postdoc at Stanford University.
Research
My research broadly focusses on large-scale evolutionary trends through Earth history, while integrating the fossil and rock record and computational methods.
During my PhD research, I utilised trilobites 
as a model system, but I have since branched out to also study other groups, such as broad-scale analyses on all marine invertebrates 
and focussed analyses of trait evolution in snails 
.
Current projects and interests
- Phylogenetic methods/incorporating fossil data into phylogenetic inference and comparative methods
- Influence of development and growth on trilobite evolution
- Evolution of morphological disparity in marine invertebrates
- Evolution of body size
- Traits that promote or constrain aquatic to terrestrial transitions in gastropods