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

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

from 2009 until 2015. She briefly moved her lab to the

John Innes Centre The John Innes Centre (JIC), located in Norwich, Norfolk, England, is an independent centre for research and training in plant and microbial science founded in 1910. It is a registered charity (No 223852) grant-aided by the Biotechnology and ...

in Norwich, UK (2015-2019) before moving to th
ETH in Zürich Switzerland
to take up a full professorship in Plant Evolutionary Genetics and Molecular Biology in early 2019. She was born in 1973 in Germany and grew up in

Castle Rock, Colorado Castle Rock is a home rule town that is the county seat and the most populous municipality of Douglas County, Colorado, United States. The town population was 73,158 at the 2020 United States Census, a 51.68% increase since the 2010 United St ...

. She received her Bachelor of Arts in biochemistry and biology from

The University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

in 1996. For her PhD with John Doebley at the

University of Wisconsin A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States, ...

- Madison, she studied extant domesticated

Maize Maize ( ; ''Zea mays'' subsp. ''mays'', from es, maíz after tnq, mahiz), also known as corn (North American and Australian English), is a cereal grain first domesticated by indigenous peoples in southern Mexico about 10,000 years ago. The ...

(called "Corn" colloquially in

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

) with some study of Teosinte, 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 Detlef Weigel (born 1961 in Lower Saxony, Germany) is a German American scientist working at the interface of developmental and evolutionary biology. Education Weigel was an undergraduate in biology and chemistry at the universities of Bielefel ...

at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in

Tübingen Tübingen (, , Swabian: ''Dibenga'') is a traditional university city in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated south of the state capital, Stuttgart, and developed on both sides of the Neckar and Ammer rivers. about one in three ...

, 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

MacArthur Fellowship The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to between 20 and 30 indi ...

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".https://ethz.ch/en/the-eth-zurich/education/awards/golden-owl.html 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

at the MacArthur Foundation

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

References

Further reading