Dr. Kimberly Gilbert

I am a population geneticist and evolutionary biologist interested in the processes that drive adaptive and maladaptive change in populations. I focus in particular on how demographic processes can alter the interaction of natural selection and genetic drift over time and space as populations evolve. As an Ambizione fellow at the Institute of Plant Sciences, I will be combining theoretical simulation approaches with empirical work in Arabis alpina to further understand the impact of species range expansions on populations' abilities to adapt to novel environments and survive in the face of accumulating deleterious genetic variation.