His work focuses on the ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that shape natural communities across multiple spatial scales.

Urban was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) in Santa Barbara, California from 2006 to 2008.

As a contributor to the subfield of Eco-evolution, he is one of the founders of the evolving metacommunity framework,[1] which emphasizes the joint interaction between species-sorting and local adaptation across environmental patches linked by dispersal in determining patterns of diversity across natural landscapes.

[3] He suggests that adaptation might occur much more often at fine scales because migrants often do poorly outside of their local environment, thus affecting the realized gene flow.

His work on accelerating extinction risks to species from climate change was highlighted as #15 top news story of 2015 by Discover Magazine.