Wayne Maddison

I found my passion at 13 years old, when a jumping spider looked up at me.  From there, a natural fascination with diversity — how many ways are there for a jumping spider to be? — led to systematics and phylogeny.  My work is now both empirical, on spiders, and theoretical, on the use of phylogeny in evolutionary inference.

While I am inclined toward the conceptual, more than anything else I enjoy field work and drawing spiders under the microscope.  Check out our page on Research to see more of what I’ve done.