Associate Professor
Curriculum vítae (pdf)
I have always been intrigued by how plants, as sessile organisms, cope with their environment, and how this interaction with external factors shapes their distribution and form. Plants are not scattered throughout the landscape at random, the presence of a particular plant in a given site depends on the confluence of many elements in ways that are hard to fathom, but measurable.
My research focuses on how the capacity of plants to modify and select their habitat interacts with genetic processes to ultimately determine ecological and evolutionary dynamics. It is necessarily interdisciplinary work, lying at the interface of plant ecophysiology and phylogenetic, population and functional genetics.
Like art, science can only be meaningful if it is made available to an audience beyond its practitioners. However, there is often a gap in communication between the scientific community and the rest of society. I believe that one of the societal duties of scientists is to narrow this gap.Bringing science to the general public is an important part of my work.