Kirsten Bomblies

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Kirsten Bomblies is an American biological researcher. Her research focuses primarily on species in the Arabidopsis genus, particularly Arabidopsis arenosa. She has studied processes related to speciation and hybrid incompatibility, and currently focuses on the adaptive evolution of meiosis in response to climate and genome change.

She was assistant professor and then Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at

in 1996.

For her PhD with

, its wild precursor. She examined how these plants as well as organisms in general develop to their extant form and function due to the influence of their component genes, proteins and other intrinsic and extrinsic forces.

As a postdoc with Detlef Weigel at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany, she began to study how individuals interact with other organisms and to examine selection forces within and across species boundaries, accessions, chronological gradients and other delineations. The work has an experimental component but the theoretical implications of the discoveries Bomblies and her colleagues made have received much attention.

She was awarded a

in 2008. She joined the faculty of Harvard University in July 2009 and the ETH in 2019.

At ETH Zürich Bomblies studies the evolution of meiosis, particularly recombination and chromosome segregation.

In 2022 she received the "Golden Owl", an award which is voted on by the students and given by the VSETH (the students association of ETH) to lecturers for "exceptional teaching".^[1][2]

In her spare time she does illustrations, etchings and other art. She loves hiking, rock climbing, and other sports.

References

• Professor Kirsten Bomblies at ETH Zürich
• Inaugural lecture at ETH Zurich, 2020
• Kirsten Bomblies at the MacArthur Foundation
• Incoming faculty Harvard University, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
• German-American plant evolution biologist wins MacArthur Award, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, September 23, 2008

Further reading

• Kirsten Bomblies publications indexed by Google Scholar
• Art by Kirsten Bomblies