Schultz EvoGenome Lab

Welcome

Animals originated in the ocean over half a billion years ago. How have animals diversified from an ancestor with only one or a few cells, to the incredibly rich spectrum of body plans, cell types, and ecological strategies that fill Earth’s habitats today? We compare chromosome-scale genomes across the diversity of animals and their closest relatives, from ctenophores and sponges to protists, to read the evolutionary record preserved in chromosome structure and sequence. We are also extending these approaches to understand how genome evolution contributes to human disease.

We study ctenophores, sponges, and other marine animals in nature firsthand and in the lab to generate questions about their biology, and use comparative genomics and molecular biology to answer those questions. Our work has shown that chromosomal rearrangements carry an irreversible record of deep evolutionary history, and we are now scaling these approaches across the tree of animal life. Given the challenges of working with non-model organisms, we develop new computational and molecular tools, sharing our toolkit as open-source software for large-scale comparative genomics. We are now developing single-cell and multi-omic approaches to connect how chromosomes change over evolutionary time to how cells diversify and specialize.

The Schultz EvoGenome Lab is based at Lehigh University and Lehigh Oceans, starting July 2026.