A fish saying hello.

Hannah Weller

Hannah Weller

Postdoctoral researcher

University of Helsinki

I want to know how to interpret organisms in the light of their developmental and evolutionary history. We often assume every trait on an organism has been “optimized” under natural selection, but this is almost never true: evolution wanders.

I find it helpful to think about every living thing as being like a very, very old house. Some of the parts are there because they’ve always been useful (walls), and some of the parts are new additions for new functions (solar panels); but a lot of parts are there because it was easier to modify what existed than it was to build something from scratch, especially if the house needs to be habitable the whole time (and the available changes are random). And, like houses, I think we can learn a lot about organisms by understanding them as the outcomes of their history.

View my CV.

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Interests
  • Life history evolution
  • Visual signaling and perception
  • Macroevolutionary constraints & opportunities
  • Historical contingency
  • Image processing
Education
  • PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, 2023

    Brown University

  • MSc in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, 2019

    Brown University

  • BSc in Biology, 2016

    University of Chicago

Projects

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colordistance

colordistance

An R package for quantitative color comparisons.

recolorize

recolorize

An R package for automatic, semi-automatic, and manual color segmentation.

Insect Color Database

Insect Color Database

Check out the Insect Color Database, a resource for storing image, spectral, and EM data relating to insect color.

Recent Publications

You can search all publications and filter by subject here.

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