Biology Seminar Series: Erika Edwards, "Plant adventures in photosynthesis"

Erika Edwards is a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, and currently also serves as Curator of Botany and Paleobotany in the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and as Director of Marsh Botanical Garden. Edwards earned her undergraduate degree from Stanford University (1998) and her Ph.D. from Yale University (2005). She spent two years as a post-doctoral research associate at University of California, Santa Barbara, and joined the faculty at Brown University in 2007. She remained at Brown for ten years (2007-2017) where she also served as Director of the Brown University Herbarium (2008-2017), before joining the faculty at Yale. Edwards has served as Advisory Council Chair for the Botanical Society of America (2016-2019) and President of the Society of Systematic Biologists (2019-2021). In 2016 Edwards received the Presidential Award for Early Career Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) from President Obama. Her research focuses on various problems in plant evolution, and integrates across many types of biological data, from molecules to global climate, to build a complete picture of how and why plants have evolved such a diverse array of forms.