Distinguished Professor Department of Ecology and Evolution SUNY at Stony Brook State University of New York

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Ph.D. 1962, The University of Kansas F. James Rohlf Morphometrics website F. James Rohlf is a S.U.N.Y. Distinguished Professor and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is interested in the applications of mathematical methods and statistics (especially multivariate statistics) to problems in biology with emphasis on morphometrics and the theory of systematics. Along with Robert Sokal, he is the co-author of the popular text Biometry, now in its third edition. Recent research projects have been concerned with the relatively new field of geometric morphometrics - using statistics to study variation in the shapes of biological structures its covariation with other variables. It is "geometric" because it involves a more complete capturing of shape than could be done with traditional ad hoc suites of measurements, ratios, and angles. Recent work has focused on some of the mathematical and statistical properties of morphological shape spaces. These methods usually begin with coordinates of landmarks on the organism and often use the thin-plate splines to express the statistical results as deformations. This approach allows rigorous statistical analyses and powerful graphic visualizations of the results. For related information see our Morphometrics web page.