Curtis Congreve

View CV

Bio

I grew up around the Chicago area, but moved around quite a bit throughout my life. I got my undergraduate degree in up-state New York, moved to Kansas to get my PhD, and spent some time working in Pennsylvania before joining NCSU in the fall semester of 2018. I am a member of the teaching faculty and a paleontologist.

As a paleontologist, I am particularly interested in the interconnection between life and the other components of the Earth System. This interest has been fueled by my past work studying the evolutionary and ecological changes occurring during the Ordovician (~485 – ~443 mya); a period that begins with one of the largest evolutionary radiations in Earth’s history and ends with the second largest mass extinction. Both of these events are associated with significant changes in the global climate. My work uses phylogenetic and biogeographic methods to look for evolutionary trends across fossil invertebrate groups during periods of major environmental change, like the Ordovician.

View Research Publications

Area(s) of Expertise

My research focuses on the following topics:

1) Reconstructing the evolutionary history of a fossil group using computational phylogenetic methods.
2) Identifying correlations between evolutionary rate shifts and paleoenvironmental changes across groups of fossil animals.
3) Understanding how geographic occupation impacts survivorship during major extinction events.
4) Determining the geographic origins of fossil clades using phylogeographic methods.
5) Taxonomic description/revision of fossil trilobites and brachiopods.
6) Incorporating macroecological data into a phylogenetic framework (Phylogenetic Paleoecology)