Shane Cornell Campbell-Staton, PhD
Assistant Professor at UCLA
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Institute for Society and Genetics
Abstract
Dr. Campbell-Staton will talk about several ongoing projects in his lab that focus on rapid responses to human-associated environmental changes. Polar vortex storms, urban heat islands, civil war and poaching - we are having dramatic impacts on wild populations around the world. Understanding how we change the wildlife that live along side us and how those changes will influence the future is one of the most pressing concerns of modern biology. Campbell-Staton will talk about how his work is shedding light on these human-animal dynamics.
Speaker Bio
Dr Campbell-Staton is an evolutionary biologist and Assistant Professor at UCLA. He studies how climate shapes demographic history and adaptation over prehistoric and contemporary time periods. A major goal of his research is to understand how wild populations respond to anthropogenic climate change. Human modifications to the natural world present extreme and novel environments for many species around the globe, providing contemporary experiments to test hypotheses about evolution and adaptation. The study of evolution in response to human-mediated environmental change is key to understanding, predicting and mitigating deleterious effects of such events.