Principal Investigator
Art Weis – Professor
Recently I have become interested in the selective pressures imposed by climate change. I established the Experimental Climate Warming Array at the Koffler Scientific Reserve as a device to study plant growth performance under future temperature regimes, in an otherwise natural setting.to
I also initiated Project Baseline, which has secured genetic materials that future researches will need to gauge evolutionary response to global change. This project grew out of the lab’s work in California, which discovered an evolutionary shift in flowering time in Brassica rapa following and multi-year drought. We grew seeds collected before the drought side-by-side with seeds collected after. As predicted by theory, these populations evolved a one-week acceleration in flowering time over just 5 generations. Project Baseline will make similar experiments possible with dozens of species from across North America.
The move from California to Ontario has been terrific. I grew up in Aurora, Illinois (home town of Wayne and Garth—party on!) so it was a return to a familiar climate.
Graduate Students
Yimin Yu (M.Sc – September 2020)
My name is Yimin Yu, I’m studying my MSc in the Weis lab. I graduated from University of Toronto, double major in EEB and Immunology. My research focuses on the potential genetic correlation between flowering time and herbivory tolerance in Brassica rapa. Currently I’m conducting a preliminary greenhouse experiment on B. rapa strains that were artificially selected on early and late flowering to confirm this genetic correlation. I love to travel in my spare time but recently due to the COVID pandemic my new hobby became stay at home and read. Hopefully we all get used to this new “normal” life.
Jameson Kunkel (M.Sc – September 2021)
Come back later!
Undergraduate Students
Alice DesRoches (Research Assistant)
After completing my 4th year thesis (EEB498), I will be spending the summer wrapping up my research. I am currently exploring indirect genetic effects in Brassica rapa competitive dominance and impacts on flowering phenology and fitness. When not in the greenhouse, I enjoy reading, biking around the city, and taking care of my many houseplants.
Ariane Mooney (Work Study)
I am a third year work-study student double majoring in Environmental Biology and Immunology, and minoring in Environmental Science. I am currently helping Sarah in her experiment researching the possible bias that could occur when preserving seeds over long periods of time. I am very interested in research combining the aspects of climate change, environmental science, conservation and biology as I am very passionate about sustainability, how we can scientifically discover the direct effects of climate change on many organisms, and how we can combat it using this knowledge! I am also very interested in sustainable fashion so if anyone has any thrift store recommendations, let me know!