Crab-eating seal
Lobodon carcinophaga

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My chief research interest is the relationship between morphology and function in the teeth of mammals. There are three main aspects to this: figuring out the functional principles of teeth and how morphology controls function, primarily through the application of engineering methods; measurement of functional aspects of real teeth from three-dimensional surface data of mammalian teeth; and three-dimensional modelling of hypothetical and existing tooth forms.

I am a Research Fellow in the School of Biological Sciences under Australian Research and Monash Research Fellowships. I completed my PhD in zoology at Monash University in 2003. This covered many aspects of how insectivore and carnivore teeth work, mainly focussing on insectivorous microbats. Since then I have been involved in work on aspects of tooth function of herbivores such as buffalo, examining mutant and transgenic mouse dentitions, the diversity of muroid dentitions, and the carnivores of Europe. From 2003 to 2008 I was a postdoctoral fellow with Mikael Fortelius and Jukka Jernvall in the Evolution & Development Lab in the Institute of Biotechnology, University of Helsinki. One of the main projects I am working on is the MorphoBrowser, an online browsable database of 3D tooth shapes.