Erika Jeannine Edwards is a professor at

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

known for her work on evolution of plants. She is also the director of the

Marsh Botanical Garden The Marsh Botanical Garden is a botanical garden and arboretum located on the Yale University campus at 265 Mansfield Street in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. History The Garden was established in 1899 when paleontologist Othniel Charles ...

Education and career

Edwards has a B.S. from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

(1998) and earned her Ph.D. from

where she worked on the evolution of the ''

Pereskia ''Pereskia'' is a small genus of about four species of cacti that do not look much like other types of cacti, having substantial leaves and non-succulent stems. The genus is named after Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, a 16th-century French bota ...

'', a genus of cactus. Following her Ph.D. she was a postdoctoral researcher at the

University of California at Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a public land-grant research university in Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduates and 2,983 graduate students enrolled in 2021–2022. It is part of the Un ...

before accepting a position at

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...

as an assistant professor in 2007. In 2017 she moved to Yale University as a professor and director of the Marsh Botanical Garden. In 2020 she began her term as president of the

Society of Systematic Biologists The Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB) started as the Society of Systematic Zoology in 1947. A temporary constitution was adopted at the first meeting on 28 December 1947. The updated "biologists" organization (from "zoology") become incorpora ...

Research

Edwards research focuses on succulents and the evolution of

C4 carbon fixation carbon fixation or the Hatch–Slack pathway is one of three known photosynthetic processes of carbon fixation in plants. It owes the names to the 1960's discovery by Marshall Davidson Hatch and Charles Roger Slack that some plants, when sup ...

in plants. Her early research centered on ''Pereskia'' where she examined its physiology and the its place in the evolutionary history of

cactus A cactus (, or less commonly, cactus) is a member of the plant family Cactaceae, a family comprising about 127 genera with some 1750 known species of the order Caryophyllales. The word ''cactus'' derives, through Latin, from the Ancient Greek ...

plants. Her research into C4 carbon fixation has examined how climate change alters the distribution of the C4 grasses and revealed that the C4 carbon fixation pathway gives plants an advantage in dry environments. Her subsequent research tracked the increase in C4 grasses with increases in tropical woodlands and savannas. Edwards led the working group which established the phylogeny of C4 grasses and defined the genetic differences across different types of grass. She uses changes in leaf shape to define how plants expend their resources during growth, examines plants' responses to changes in biome. and compares the parallel evolution of C4 photosynthesis and

crassulacean acid metabolism Crassulacean acid metabolism, also known as CAM photosynthesis, is a carbon fixation pathway that evolved in some plants as an adaptation to arid conditions that allows a plant to photosynthesize during the day, but only exchange gases at night. ...

Selected publications

* * * *

Awards and honors

In 2016, Edwards received a

Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers The Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) is the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on outstanding scientists and engineers in the early stages of their independent research careers. The White ...

(PECASE).

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Edwards, Erika Stanford University alumni Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni Yale University faculty Women botanists Women evolutionary biologists Women climatologists Living people Year of birth missing (living people) Recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers