James Mulqueeney

James is an evolutionary biologist specializing in the study of how life diversifies and adapts over time. Their research focuses on understanding the forces that shape the form and function of organisms, from individual traits to entire clades, using both modern and fossil species. By combining cutting-edge technologies such as 3D imaging, computational morphometrics, and artificial intelligence, they analyze the shapes and structures of organisms to uncover patterns of evolution, adaptation, and recovery after major environmental events.

Currently, James is investigating how scallops and other bivalves rebounded following the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous, exploring how evolutionary history, functional demands, and ecological opportunities interact to shape biodiversity. Their work provides new insights into how species recover from crises, how constraints guide the evolution of new forms, and how ecological roles influence the paths organisms take through evolutionary time.

Through their research, James aims to bridge the gap between computational methods and evolutionary theory, bringing advanced analytical tools to the study of life’s history and helping to illuminate the processes that generate and maintain biodiversity across the planet.

• PhD, University of Southampton & Natural History Museum, London, 2025
• MSci, University of Bristol, 2021

• Google Scholar
• Curriculum Vitae
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Evolutionary Ecology, Morphometrics, Artificial Intelligence, Phenomics

• Roberts, L.E., Mulqueeney, J.M., He, Y., Randau, M., Whitmore, D. and Goswami, A., 2025. Landmark-free morphometrics reveals sexual dimorphism in shape and integration of tagmata in the forensically important blowfly Calliphora vicina. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 205(2), p.zlaf104.
• Brombacher, A., Searle-Barnes, A., Mulqueeney, J.M., Standish, C.D., Milton, J.A., Katsamenis, O.L., Watson, R.A., Trueman, C., Sinclair, I., Wilson, P.A. and Foster, G.L., 2025. Detecting environmentally dependent developmental plasticity in fossilized individuals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(27), p.e2421549122.
• Mulqueeney, J.M., Ezard, T.H. and Goswami, A., 2025. Assessing the application of landmark-free morphometrics to macroevolutionary analyses. BMC Ecology and Evolution, 25(1), p.38.
• Lin, H., Zhang, W., Mulqueeney, J.M., Brombacher, A., Searle‐Barnes, A., Nixon, M., Cai, X. and Ezard, T.H., 2024. 3DKMI: A MATLAB package to generate shape signatures from Krawtchouk moments and an application to species delimitation in planktonic foraminifera. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 15(11), pp.1940-1948.
• He, Y.*, Mulqueeney, J.M.*, Watt, E.C*., Salili-James, A., Barber, N., Camaiti, M., Hunt, E.S.E., Kippax-Chui, O., Knapp, A., Lanzetti, A., Rangel-de Lázaro, G., McMinn, J.K., Minus, J., Mohan A.V., Roberts, L.E., Adhami, D., Grisan, E., Gu, Q., Herridge, V., Poon, S.T.S., West, T., Goswami, A. 2024. Opportunities and challenges in applying AI to evolutionary morphology. Integrative Organismal Biology, p.obae036. *Joint first authors.
• Mulqueeney, J.M., Searle-Barnes, A., Brombacher, A., Sweeney, M., Goswami, A. and Ezard, T.H.G, 2024. How many specimens make a sufficient training set for automated three-dimensional feature extraction?. Royal Society Open Science, 11(6), pp.rsos-240113.