Welcome to the Department of Biology
Kirsten Bomblies has started her position as Full Professor of Molecular Plant Sciences as of 1 March 2019. In her research, she focuses on the selection forces that drive the evolution of plants, and the molecular basis of adaptation. This professorship is located in the Institute of Molecular Plant Biology.
Kirsten Bomblies was born in in Germany and grew up in Castle Rock, Colorado. She started her research career as a research assistant, before embarking on a PhD studying the history of maize domestication at the University of Wisconsin. After this, she worked as a postdoc at the Max Plank Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen studying the evolution of autoimmunity in plants. Since 2009 she has managed her lab at Harvard University where she initiated her work on the evolution of meiosis in response to habitat change and genome duplication. In 2015 she moved her lab to the John Innes Centre in Norwich, UK. Her current research focuses mostly on the adaptive evolution of meiosis in the sexual reproduction of plants as a result of environmental stress factors, such as higher temperatures caused by climate change, as well as changes in the genome, such as polyploidy.
Link to the website of the Institute of Molecular Plant Biology