Roderick Dewar's current research looks at the emergent behaviour of complex biological and physical systems - whether individual organisms, ecosystems, turbulent fluids or Earth's climate system - from the common viewpoint of entropy, as the statistical outcome of a large number of underlying degrees of freedom. The main focus is on the principles of maximum entropy and maximum entropy production, and their application to biological problems across a wide range of scales - from understanding the evolutionary optimization of biologically important macromolecules to identifying the key determinants of species diversity in ecological communities.