Profiles of Leading Women Scientists on AcademiaNet – an initiative of the Robert Bosch Stiftung.
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Year of election: | 2013 |
Section: | Organismic and Evolutionary Biology |
City: | Jena |
Country: | Germany |
Prof. Ian T. Baldwin is distinguished by having integrated the advances in molecular biology into the study of ecological interactions to catalyze a change in how ecologists examine ecological interactions and falsify hypotheses and by having integrated the whole-organismic expertise of ecologists into the study of gene function.
To accomplish these integrations, he became the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena Germany, where he currently heads the Department of Molecular Ecology and is training the next generation of whole-organismic biologists (genome-enabled field biologists).
In this research program, Baldwin and his students regularly use a nature preserve in the Great Basin Desert of the US to conduct experiments with genetically modified plants in the plant's native environment to understand the genes that matter for survival under real world conditions. The research program has uncovered mechanisms by which plants resist and tolerate attack from herbivores and pathogens and optimize pollination services.