Tara Smiley, assistant professor in the College of Arts and Sciences Department of Ecology and Evolution, is an evolutionary ecologist interested in how climate and landscape history shape the diversity, biogeography, and ecological structure of mammalian faunas across spatio-temporal scales. She tests hypotheses about how changes in climate, tectonic activity, topographic complexity, and habitat heterogeneity impact communities and ecological processes at local scales and govern diversity at regional scales.
Smiley’s research group integrates fieldwork, specimen-based research, and quantitative paleobiology. Primary tools of its research include stable isotope ecology and paleoenvironmental reconstruction, analysis of trait variation, diversification analysis, and coupling of geological and biological modeling approaches. The group works in western North America and in the East African Rift, both tectonically active and dynamic landscapes with high species richness today and in the past. Along with collaborators at the Turkana Basin Institute (TBI), the group is actively developing projects in the fossil-rich setting of Turkana Basin in Kenya.
In August 2025, Smiley received the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award for her project, “Unlocking the small-mammal fossil record to investigate eco-evolutionary responses to landscape and climate dynamics: a multi-proxy and cross-scale approach,” and award just shy of one million dollars.
Smiley’s proposal aims to develop novel multi-proxy trait data from the small-mammal fossil record to capture dietary ecology, habitat use, and ecological structure across a hierarchy of taxonomic, spatial, and temporal scales. Research will unfold across the fossil record of two continental systems — the Basin and Range Province of western North America and the East Africa Rift in Kenya — providing a comparative framework for evaluating the roles of global and regional climate change, the expansion of C4 grasslands, and tectonic regime on the eco-evolutionary history of small mammals during the Miocene, a period known for the assembly of modern biota.
By integrating multi-proxy data from fossil and geological records, Smiley’s work will provide a rich comparative framework to help answer long-standing and pressing questions in biology: What are the governing rules structuring ecological diversity? How do species adapt and diversify during times of environmental upheaval?