E&E Seminar: Genetic viability through sexual flexibility in plants by Dr. Ingrid Jordon-Thaden, University of Wisconsin-Madison
November 5, 2019
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
SEL 4289, 840 West Taylor St, Chicago, IL 60607
Address
Chicago, IL 60607
Calendar
Download iCal FileFaculty Host: Boris Igic
Abstract: Animals experiencing adverse conditions can use their mobility to ensure their long-term survival of their species. Plants, however, have evolved different strategies to cope with a changing environment. Ingrid will discuss sexual methods plants use to survive an ever-changing world. These include different sexual strategies that can increase the likelihood of the long-term species survival. Plants can skip sex entirely by producing seeds spontaneously to ensure progeny when pollinators are scarce, and others have complex arrangements and timing of their flower parts to reduce inbreeding. As the Director of the Botany Garden and Greenhouses of the Department of Botany at UW Madison, she will illustrate her work since 2006 in an alpine genus, Draba, that has many different methods of sexual flexibility. https://jordonthaden.botany.wisc.edu/
Biography: Ingrid Jordon-Thaden was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska. Her two undergraduate bachelor’s degrees are in horticulture and chemistry from University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she carried out research in chemical taxonomy of native thistles and an Ulmus hybrid swarm. Ingrid then completed her masters in biology at UNL in corn mitochondria proteomics while managing the undergraduate botany lab courses. She moved to Germany in 2006 where she attended University of Heidelberg in plant systematics with a Brassicaceae (mustard family) research group. Her PhD thesis focused on the molecular systematics and biodiversity of Draba.
Ingrid then moved to Gainesville, Florida in 2010 to do a post-doctorate in Tragopogon polyploidization research at the University of Florida with Pam Soltis. In 2012, she moved to University of California-Berkeley as a Research Botanist with University and Jepson Herbaria where she continued her Draba research. From 2013 to 2015, she moved to Bucknell University, in central Pennsylvania, as the David Burpee Plant Genetics Post-Doctorate Fellow with Chris Martine. There she worked on dioecious spiny Australian Solanumpopulation genetics and phylogenetics, and taught a course in Plant Anatomy. In September 2015, she moved back to UC Berkeley as a lab manager in the fern genomics lab of Carl Rothfels, become a lecturer of Vascular Plant Systematics, and continue her appointment as Research Botanist for the University and Jepson Herbaria.
Since 2007, she has regularly traveled to alpine ecosystems in Europe and North America to collect and study the systematics of Draba and other alpine plants. She is interested in the evolution of the wide array of systems of plant sexuality such as asexual seed production (apomixis), self-incompatibility, self-pollination, self-fertilization, insect-dependent pollination, and functional dioecy.
Date posted
May 28, 2019
Date updated
Oct 29, 2019