Ken is a researcher and head of the invertebrates and plants palaeobiology division at the Natural History Museum. He studies the history of coral reef ecosystems over time scales ranging from decades to tens of millions of years. Coral reefs are currently experiencing rapid change, resulting from a variety of natural and anthropogenic impacts. Documenting how reefs have responded to past environmental changes will help to constrain the potential trajectory of future changes and allow us to plan accordingly.
This work requires assembling large-scale biodiversity and ecological databases to compare ecosystem structure and function in multiple regions, such as my projects in the Coral Triangle and the Caribbean. Ken takes advantage of new advances in informatics and enjoy developing and applying the quantitative methods required to address these issues.