Our Scientists

The Arboretum is home to diverse nitrogen-fixing legume species originating from around the world. Alaina Bisson will sample the root nodules from 100 trees with known origins in the Arboretum. She will sequence and identify the nitrogen-fixing rhizobia bacterial communities associated with these trees and determine if the location of origin impacts the community composition.

Benton Taylor focuses on how plants respond-to and influence their environments, particularly in view of global change. Although the primary focus of the Taylor lab is at the ecosystem scale, the research questions require viewing plants at individual as well as community scales toward a better understanding of the role of plants in global processes.

Calvin Heslop is a graduate student in the Taylor Lab. He is an ecosystem ecologist interested in the biotic and abiotic controls on nutrient cycling in terrestrial environments. His research focuses on how the N fixing shrub Siberian alder influences community composition, N cycling, and C balance in arctic Alaska.

Carina Berlingeri is a graduate student in the Taylor Lab. She is engaged in several projects studying how different global change drivers (nutrient pollution, disturbance, and rising CO₂) alter belowground symbioses and plant resource-acquisition strategies.

Christina Steinecke is an evolutionary biologist broadly interested in major evolutionary transitions in plants and the conditions that produce them. More specifically, she is interested in identifying the unique forces that drive the enormous diversity in plant reproductive strategies. In the Hopkins lab, she is working to elucidate the causes and consequences of hybridization, polyploidy, and contrasting life history strategies in Texan Phlox species.

Daniel is a graduate student in the Friedman lab. Fascinated with the morphological evolution of plants, he is interested in studying plants from an organismal perspective, integrating the developmental, morphological, biogeographical, and ecological patterns to understand how the extraordinary diversity of plant forms has come to be. His research focuses on plant genera of the Canary Islands.

A professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. The Kramer Lab is interested in the evolution of plant developmental genetics with a particular focus on floral evolution.

Eve Farrell is a graduate student in the Taylor Lab who is interested in how mycorrhizal association type and global change shape both local plant-fungal interactions and broader biogeochemical processes.

The research interests of Faye Rosin bear on investigating how gene expression is regulated and the consequences of that regulation at the molecular, cellular, and developmental levels.

Felix Wu is broadly interested in understanding the mechanistic basis of evolutionary processes—in particular, mutation and speciation—as well as the differential impact of these processes across the tree of life. In the Hopkins lab, he is researching the history of hybridization between three species of Texas annual Phlox and developing genomic tools to help us answer these questions.

Gabe Effiong is an aspiring evolutionary biologist who’s fascinated with the diversity of form in flowering plants. He’s worked on a range of taxa including Mimulus, Cupressaceae, and Drosophila species. As a graduate student in the Hopkins Lab, he is focusing on holistically understanding selective mechanisms driving floral trait divergence, as well as morphological responses to polyploidy and hybridization events in closely related angiosperms.

Gary Hilderbrand is a landscape architect with a deep and abiding interest in the urban forest canopy. At the Harvard Graduate School of Design, I am the Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice, and it’s my honor to be the current Chair of GSD’s Department of Landscape Architecture. I am also a founding principal of Reed Hilderbrand, a 25-year landscape architecture practice with studios in Cambridge and New Haven.

Jeannine Cavender-Bares is a plant physiological ecologist interested in understanding how the evolutionary history of plant function influences ecosystem processes, especially in forested systems. Her team uses novel spectral biology approaches that integrate spectroscopic data and imagery to detect plant variation across scales.

Mansa Srivastav focuses on Honeysuckles (Lonicera) and the evolutionary puzzle of why only one of their three major groups has successfully made the leap into alpine environments. Using alpine ecosystems as natural laboratories, she will explore whether Lonicera species distributions reflect chance or traceable evolutionary events. During her PhD, she investigated the systematics and biogeography of Lonicera, along with species boundaries and phylogeographic patterns in a high-altitude Honeysuckle lineage endemic to the Himalayan-Hengduan region.

As a Putnam Fellow, Michael Dosmann studied the taxonomy of katsura trees (Cercidiphyllum), the reproductive biology of a rare monkshood, the efficacy of plant exploration efforts, and helped coordinate plant selection and sequence for the Leventritt Shrub and Vine Garden. Michael returned to the Arboretum in 2007 and is now the keeper of living collections where he guides the Arboretum’s stewardship and development of its collection of temperate woody species. His work explores new strategies and tactics aimed at improving collections management and enhancing the use of Arboretum collections for research. Additionally, he conducts research on the physiological ecology of woody plants and participates in floristic efforts through domestic and foreign plant exploration.

Michael LaScaleia is an invasion ecologist investigating the physical and chemical defenses that allow invasive plants to avoid damage from herbivores. His dissertation at the University of Connecticut focused on the differential densities of insect herbivores feeding on native and exotic plant species and how feeding on exotic plants may make those insects more vulnerable to predation. Michael works in temperate New England forests, and hopes his research will unlock new methods to combat invasive plant species in this system.

The Holbrook lab focuses on how the transport of water and solutes through the vascular system influences ecological, evolutionary and physiological processes.

Nikhil Chari, graduate student in the Taylor Lab, is a biogeochemist interested in carbon and nutrient cycling governing terrestrial ecosystems. His focus is currently on the effects of elevated CO2 on root-soil interactions and soil carbon dynamics.

The research interests of Peter Del Tredici are wide ranging and mainly involve the interaction between woody plants and their environment. Recently, his investigations have expanded to include studies of spontaneous urban vegetation.

Robin Hopkins is interested in natural selection and the process of speciation. The Hopkins lab studies color variation in Phlox with a growing focus on reproductive incompatibility between emerging species and understanding the key evolutionary forces at work.

Val joined the Extavour lab through the OEB graduate training program with an interest in understanding how the immediate abiotic environment and biotic interactions drive an organism’s phenotype, ecological patterning, and evolutionary processes through the interaction of genetics, and epigenetics. After starting her PhD in the Extavour lab based on her initial interest in incorporating developmental biology into her view of evolution, she soon realized that her interests lay more in adaptation and speciation genomics. She thus transferred to the lab of Robin Hopkins, where she continues to pursue her PhD studies.

Ned Friedman is interested in the organismic interfaces between developmental, phylogenetic, and evolutionary biology. The Friedman lab explores how patterns of morphology, anatomy, and reproductive biology have evolved through the modification of developmental processes.