She serves as a Research Scientist and Curator of Fishes at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution.
[1][2] Her specialty is the systematics and historical biogeography of freshwater and coastal fishes, and she has conducted research in this area for about thirty years.
[6] She has led expeditions in Papua New Guinea, the Malay Peninsula, Borneo, China, Taiwan, Sulawesi, Hawaii, Tasmania, and New Zealand.
[8] She has also written four books, including Cladistic Biogeography — Interpreting Patterns of Plant and Animal Distributions, for which a second edition was published in 1999.
[9] Her most recent book, Comparative Biogeography: Discovering and Classifying Biogeographical Patterns of a Dynamic Earth (2009, University of California Press), was recognized in 2010 as the Smithsonian Secretary’s Research Prize Winner.