As part of the Amphibian and Reptile Diversity Research Center at the University of Texas at Arlington, the Eric N. Smith research group is involved in obtaining a better understanding of the evolutionary relationships among these organisms. The group's collective research crosses a broad range of geographic and disciplinary boundaries focusing on the phylogenetic systematics, biogeography, ecology, physiology and conservation of taxa from locations in Central America, Africa, India and Indonesia.
Research interests include the evolution and systematics of a variety of tropical taxa including squamates and anurans, theoretical cladistic approaches to optimizing character information while minimizing assumptions, mitochondrial genomics and the statistical modeling of molecular and morphological data.
