Lisa Donovan
Professor of Plant Biology
- Creative Research Medal, 2006
Lisa Donovan, Professor of Plant Biology, approaches the concept of evolution from an ecological perspective by exploring how traits and adaptations enable newly-formed hybrid plants to survive. She is one of the founders of ecological-evolutionary functional genomics, and has applied her novel approach to the study of a hybrid sunflower that evolved in desert habitats and has more extreme versions of its parent-plants’ traits than either of the original two plants, which allow it to survive where its predecessors cannot.
