Dr. Kathryn D. Kavanagh
Associate Professor of Biology
Education
PhD in Biology, James Cook University of North Queensland, 1998
MA in Marine Science, College of William and Mary, 1992
Bio narrative: Kathryn Kavanagh is a broadly accomplished evolutionary developmental biologist, published in Nature, Science, PNAS, and other top scientific research journals on aspects of vertebrate reproduction, embryology, life history and marine ecology. She has made pioneering research discoveries on how development evolves in relation to life history strategies and on developmental bias in the evolution of morphology. An early interest in larval fishes combined with the opportunity to join several field expeditions, led her to study fish diversity in remote atolls and mountain streams, and then to turn to graduate studies to reflect on her field observations within evolutionary theory. Her PhD work in Australia on embryonic development of sensory and locomotor systems among the coral reef damselfishes – made possible by her technical successes in raising Great Barrier Reef fish through the life cycle in captivity – opened new avenues of experimental and comparative work for the reef research community. In the late 1990s, she published a series of papers describing the radical reproductive style and life history of the larval brooding damselfish Acanthochromis, which has since become a model species for reef fish research. In experimental work during postdoctoral studies at Harvard and Helsinki, she studied patterns and mechanisms of developmental stability and plasticity in the embryos of frogs, chickens, and mice, which led to the discovery of the Inhibitory Cascade Model. This simple developmental rule provided an observable solution for a long-standing evolutionary problem of how novelties can arise in the embryo without disrupting its functioning. The IC model explains how sequentially-forming organs, such as molars and phalanges, evolve in a way that allows ecologically adaptive variations in proportions to arise without destabilizing the entire developmental network. This model has inspired hundreds of investigations over a decade and serves as an exemplary model of developmental bias on evolution. Her recent students have worked on marine fish embryonic responses to temperature and oxygen levels, ontogeny of whale behaviors, and deeper-time studies of skeletal evo-devo in vertebrates. She has given seminars and lectures all over the world on her research and collaborates with geneticists, biophysicists, and mathematicians to explore the ‘rules’ of embryonic morphogenesis. In broader impacts to the community, she has encouraged citizen science involvement in biodiversity research, founded several summer science camps for girls, and contributed her scientific perspective and data analytics skills to current public policy debates in the fields of reproductive biology and biodiversity conservation.