Michael Alfaro

About

Michael Alfaro is a Professor and Chair in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA. His research program aims to understand the factors that govern the evolutionary dynamics of organismal diversification. He investigates how to explain the uneven patterns of species richness and morphological diversity across the Tree of Life, focusing on the adequacy of macroevolutionary theory in explaining diversity patterns and the relationship between morphological diversity and ecological or functional diversity. Alfaro works on two main systems: coral reef fishes and neotropical primates, employing an interdisciplinary and quantitative approach that crosses traditional boundaries among molecular phylogenetics, evolutionary morphology, and theoretical evolution. His research involves constructing evolutionary trees using phylogenomic approaches, testing evolutionary hypotheses with phylogenetic statistical methods, and exploring form-function dynamics through models of trait evolution. His contributions include advancing understanding of organismal diversification and evolutionary patterns in marine and terrestrial species.

Research topics

• Biology
• Evolutionary biology
• Paleontology
• Zoology
• Ecology
• Genetics
• Anatomy

Selected publications

• Prolonged morphological expansion of spiny-rayed fishes following the end-Cretaceous

  Nature Ecology & Evolution · 2022 · 116 citations

  PublisherDOI

• Accelerated Diversification Explains the Exceptional Species Richness of Tropical Characoid Fishes

  Systematic Biology · 2021 · 87 citations

  The Neotropics harbor the most species-rich freshwater fish fauna on the planet, but the timing of that exceptional diversification remains unclear. Did the Neotropics accumulate species steadily throughout their long history, or attain their remarkable diversity recently? Biologists have long debated the relative support for these museum and cradle hypotheses, but few phylogenies of megadiverse tropical clades have included sufficient taxa to distinguish between them. We used 1288 ultraconserve…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Phylogenomic analysis of trichomycterid catfishes (Teleostei: Siluriformes) inferred from ultraconserved elements

  Scientific Reports · 2020 · 75 citations

  The family Trichomycteridae is one of the most diverse groups of freshwater catfishes in South and Central America with eight subfamilies, 41 genera and more than 300 valid species. Its members are widely distributed throughout South America, reaching Costa Rica in Central America and are recognized by extraordinary anatomical specializations and trophic diversity. In order to assess the phylogenetic relationships of Trichomycteridae, we collected sequence data from ultraconserved elements (UCEs…

  DOI

• <i>Sashimi</i> : A toolkit for facilitating high‐throughput organismal image segmentation using deep learning

  Methods in Ecology and Evolution · 2021-09-07 · 25 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Digitized specimens are an indispensable resource for rapidly acquiring big datasets and typically must be pre‐processed prior to conducting analyses. One crucial image pre‐processing step in any image analysis workflow is image segmentation, or the ability to clearly contrast the foreground target from the background noise in an image. This procedure is typically done manually, creating a potential bottleneck for efforts to quantify biodiversity from image databases. Image segmentation…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Prolonged morphological expansion of spiny-rayed fishes following the end-Cretaceous

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2021-07-13 · 13 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Abstract Spiny-rayed fishes (Acanthomorpha) dominate modern marine habitats and comprise more than a quarter of all living vertebrate species 1–3 . It is believed that this dominance resulted from explosive lineage and phenotypic diversification coincident with the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass-extinction event 4 . It remains unclear, however, if living acanthomorph diversity is the result of a punctuated burst or gradual accumulation of diversity following the K-Pg. We assess these hypothese…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Systematics and Influence of Coral Reefs on Diversification in Tetraodontiform Fishes

  NSF · $450k · 2009–2013

• DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Testing macroevolutionary predictions of diversity and disparity in the ray-finned fishes

  NSF · $20k · 2016–2019

• Collaborative Research: Tempo and Mode of Diversification In Vertebrates

  NSF · $265k · 2009–2013

Frequent coauthors

• Luke J. Harmon

  University of Idaho

  147 shared

• Brant C. Faircloth

  Louisiana State University

  142 shared

• Thomas J. Near

  Yale Peabody Museum

  122 shared

• Matt Friedman

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  114 shared

• James S. Albert

  University of Louisiana at Lafayette

  108 shared

• Brian C. O’Meara

  105 shared

• Liam J. Revell

  103 shared

• Samantha A. Price

  103 shared

Education

• PhD, Committee on Evolutionary Biology

  University of Chicago

  2000

Similar researchers at University of California, Los Angeles

• Lawren Sackh-95
• H. Bradley Shafferh-80
• Glen MacDonaldh-79