James is a Prize Fellow at the University of Bath, UK, where he studies the genomic basis of trait evolution in plants. His research combines phylogenomics, palaeobiology and comparative genomics to understand how genomes and gene families have evolved and how this has patterned plant diversity. He has shown how stomata have a single origin in land plants, yet across two major plant lineages have evolved along different trajectories: increasing complexity in vascular plants while reducing in nonvascular plants. He now focusses on how stomatal diversity has arisen, including their various morphologies and physiological responses.