Welcome to the Anderson Lab at Georgia Tech, a research group focused on the evolutionary origins of biodiversity. We are evolutionary biologists and ecologists studying how new species form and how they come to coexist in nature (or not!), and a key aim of our work is to draw statistical generalizations about the hypothesized drivers of these two processes. To this end, we develop new quantitative tools to address fundamental questions like "is ecology-based divergent selection generally required for speciation?",  "do the processes promoting coexistence tend to differ across environments?", and "what factors promote or hinder the extent of genomic independence between hybridizing lineages?". We deploy these and other tools to study various aspects of the ecology and evolution of real organisms using genomic and trait data that we collect from the field, lab, and from museum specimens. We are a question-driven group open to working with virtually any study system that can provide missing insight: our research has focused on birds, terrestrial vertebrates, and wild Drosophila species pairs, though we are always on the lookout for new and interesting systems that can help us address unanswered questions regarding the origin of species richness