Dr Tom Carruthers Joins GDIC

We are delighted to welcome Dr Tom Carruthers as a new member of the GDIC teaching team.

Tom’s research focuses on estimating evolutionary trees to deepen understanding of the processes that generate and maintain biodiversity across timescales ranging from the recent past to tens and hundreds of millions of years ago. His work integrates large molecular datasets to study evolutionary patterns, with a particular emphasis on plants, while also comparing evolutionary processes across diverse branches of the tree of life. Alongside empirical analysis, Tom is strongly engaged in methodological and theoretical research, developing and refining approaches that better represent uncertainty and model DNA evolution more realistically.

For the past three years, Tom has been a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan, where he built some of the largest phylogenetic trees to date, exceeding 128,000 species, and used them to explore how plant lineages evolve across different climates. Prior to this, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Kew Gardens, leading large-scale plant phylogenetics projects and investigating how conflicting genomic signals can influence evolutionary analyses. Tom completed his PhD at the University of Oxford, where his research on morning glories (Ipomoea), including the sweet potato, examined rapid speciation in South America and the impact of methodological assumptions on estimates of evolutionary timescales.

We are thrilled to have Tom join GDIC. Welcome to the team, Tom!