Title
Associate Professor

Department
Dept of Plant and Microbial Biology


Faculty URL
https://plantandmicrobiology.berkeley.edu/profile/benjamin-blackman-phd

Research Group
http://nature.berkeley.edu/blackmanlab

Email
bkblackman@berkeley.edu

Phone
(510) 664-7807


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Research Expertise and Interest
evolution, adaptation, domestication, phenotypic plasticity, flowering time, evo-devo, genomics, plant biology

Research Description
Benjamin Blackman is an associate professor in the Department of Plant and Microbiol Biology.? His?research seeks to understand how plant development and its ability to respond to changing environmental conditions evolve. Using a combination of molecular, genomic and field approaches to connect genes to traits and ecology, his research group aims to address fundamental questions about the genetics of adaptation, the evolution of development, and mechanisms of gene-environment interaction in two plant groups, sunflower and monkeyflower. Their work in these systems currently focuses on the environmental and circadian regulation of solar tracking movements by sunflower stems and of floret maturation in sunflower disks, transcriptomic and ancient DNA studies of sunflower domestication, and the ecological genetics of adaptation to local climates along environmental gradients.