17.05.2018

Tübingen and US researchers make our planet great again

DAAD funds joint project with one million euros over four years

Japanese knotweed

Foto: By No machine-readable author provided. Migas assumed (based on copyright claims). CC-BY-SA-3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Over the next four years, biologists from Germany and the US will jointly investigate the interplay between climate change, evolution and invasive species. The University of Tübingen announced on Thursday that the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) will fund the "Genomics and Epigenomics of Plant Invasion" project from 2019 to 2022 with a total of one million euros. For this project, Dr. Christina Richards, a biologist and professor at the University of South Florida, will move to Tübingen for four years and establish a research group at the Institute of Evolution & Ecology, in close collaboration with the team of Professor Oliver Bossdorf.

The project is funded by the German-French program "Make Our Planet Great Again", which was created by the governments of both countries following the Paris Agreement.

A total of 13 Germany-based research projects, selected from some 300 applications, were selected by an expert jury at the beginning of May. "The numerous excellent applications show that Germany offers excellent conditions for international researchers," said DAAD President Professor Margret Wintermantel. "The selected projects will make a significant contribution to climate, energy and earth system research and will also establish important international research cooperations.”

Professor Richards' research focuses on plant ecological genomics, ecological and evolutionary epigenetics, plant ecophysiology, conservation genetics and global change biology. She received her PhD from the University of Georgia in 2004 and worked as a Postdoctoral Associate at Stony Brook University and New York University. In 2009 she became a professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of South Florida, where she was promoted to Associate Professor in 2016.

DAAD press release (only in German)

Karl G. Rijkhoek