Academic focus: Evolution across environmental gradients and in response to climate change.
Research summary: My research focuses on rapid evolution across spatiotemporal scales with a focus on climate change and biotic interactions. At Cornell, my lab uses a combination of latitudinal surveys, common gardens, chemical ecology and landscape genomics to research geographical variation in plant trait evolution. We seek to find solutions to the biodiversity crisis by leveraging genomics and spatial-based science to inform conservation management and restoration ecology. To achieve this ultimate goal, we leverage population genomic theory and simulations in conjunction with herbarium and living (seed) collections to document contemporary evolution and model possible future adaptation.
What do you like to do when you're not working?
I enjoy trail running. It’s been great fun getting to know the local biology and getting more fit to run up and down the mountains better. I enjoy weight training, traveling to new places locally and globally, and cooking gourmet food. I am also an avid gamer (video and tabletop).
What are three adjectives people might use to describe you?
Energetic, enthusiastic, outgoing
What (specifically) brought you to Cornell CALS?
Cornell fosters interdisciplinary collaboration not just as a good idea, but as a daily structural ethos. Beyond the high caliber of research done at Cornell, the raw level of ambition and forward thinking of the transdisciplinary moonshots inspired me to scale up the scope and daring of my research and teaching – to propose an audaciously broad research program that might have been viewed as unrealistic at a smaller or less open-minded institution.
What do you think is important for people to understand about your field?
Evolution is not just something that happened millions of years ago. It is also an active, ongoing process that can span a small number of generations; that can be observable by humans; that may allow natural populations to evolve in response to climate change and anthropogenic impacts. Understanding the specific conditions of when evolution might rescue declining populations is critical to conservation efforts and to our broader understanding on how our biosphere works.
If you had unlimited grant funding, what major problem in your field would you want to solve?
My desire at Cornell is to expand the investigation of rapid evolution and its impacts to a larger part of the plant tree of life. With unlimited funds I would want to establish multiple spatial-temporal genomic timeseries. I would take samples from herbaria and match them with seeds from the near past (10-20 years ago) and present day. I would sequence the whole genome of all these samples across six to eight species or, taken to a fantastical degree dozens or hundreds of these species. Modern computation would then be used to mine this enormous landscape genomics database and try to understand what aspects of populations and/or species might lead them to be able to rapidly evolve. By learning from the immediate past (differences between populations over tens and hundreds of years) and distant past (differences between species) would give us better insights into what species and populations might be more at risk to ongoing climate change.