Chloe Pak Drummond is a botanist and evolutionary biologist interested in biogeographic patterns of North American plants. She focuses on species that have a disjunct, or discontinuous, geographic distribution in western North America and the Great Lakes region. To illuminate the ways in which biogeography and evolution interact, she tests the evolutionary histories of these disjunct species to understand how and when they arrived at their current distributions, the persistence of isolated populations in the face of climate change, and the impact of geography and environmental heterogeneity on trait variation and divergence. She is also interested in the genomic and evolutionary underpinnings of ecologically and economically important plant traits. She works with students to answer these integrated questions using field-based, molecular, and bioinformatic techniques.
Areas of Expertise
Plant biogeography, intersection of disjunct phylogeography and trait variation/divergence, evolutionary underpinnings of plant traits