Dr. Joy Bergelson has been named the James D. Watson Professor in Ecology and Evolution and the College. Dr. Bergelson’s work focuses on the plant Arabidopsis thaliana and the community of bacteria that inhabit it, with particular interest in understanding how the ecology of these interactions shapes evolutionary change. Her studies combine molecular evolutionary research with functional genomics under natural field conditions to test models of host-pathogen co-evolution. Along with colleagues she also has pioneered the development of Arabidopsis thaliana as a system for genome-wide mapping studies, which culminated in the Arabidopsis 1001 project.
We congratulate Dr. Bergelson for receiving this honor.