Dr. Jesse Lasky

Dr. Jesse Lasky

Assistant Professor

Department: Biology
College:  Eberly College of Science
Address: 408 LSB
Phone: 814.863.5318
E-mail: jrl35@psu.edu
Website: http://www.personal.psu.edu/jrl35/psu/index_JRL.html

Evolutionary adaptation to changing environments
We pursue a broad set of topics to try to understand how organisms adapt to their environments, and what this means for biodiversity and ecosystems under environmental change. We are studying climate adaptation in multiple species of plants, measuring their genotypes, phenotypes, and fitness under different environments to understand how they adapt. We do this using experiments in the field and lab combined with computational approaches. Additionally we have projects using the historical record of museum specimens to directly observe how organisms have changed as humans have changed global environments.

We study how plants adapt to climate and to other species, such as parasites.

Students entering the lab could work on any of these problems using a diversity of approaches (field, lab, computation, etc), depending on interests.