Meghan Blumstein
Education
Harvard University, PhD in Organismal and Evolutionary Biology
Middlebury College, Bachelor of Science in Environmental Studies
Biography
Researching the unprecedented levels of stress that forests are currently facing from pest and disease outbreaks, frequent and intense disturbance, fragmentation and a changing climate, Meghan Blumstein takes an interdisciplinary approach to ask, “How will forests survive the next century of stress?” She seeks to determine how much potential they have to respond, utilizing tools from genetics, genomics, physiology and modeling to understand how that stress is shaping the tree populations that provide us with countless ecosystem services while serving as a critical stabilizing force for the climate.
Blumstein’s research takes new approaches to disentangling the degree that various plant stress responses are the result of nature vs. nurture. This is a critical distinction, as the former would requisite changing seed stock for plantings or breeding new crosses for success in our future forests and cities, while the latter would necessitate management changes. Blumstein intends to bring this ecological perspective into the classroom as she did while as a teaching assistant at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. She intends to push students to think about landscapes as non-static, with the potential to evolve if given the right starting ingredients.
Blumstein was the recipient of graduate research and postdoctoral biology research fellowships from the National Science Foundation and recently won an American Journal of Botany (AJB) Synthesis Prize recognizing perspective papers by early-career scientists summarizing recent research and providing new insights advancing the field. Her work emphasizes the importance of integrating both ecology and evolution when considering forest response to climate change has recently been published in the AJB, New Phytologist, Nature Communications, and Nature Ecology & Evolution.
Blumstein holds a Ph.D. in organismal and evolutionary biology from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree in environmental studies from Middlebury College in Vermont.
Before coming to UVA, she served as a Bullard Fellow at the Harvard Forest. Holding joint appointment with the Department of Environmental Sciences and UVA’s School of Architecture (Department of Landscape Architecture), Blumstein will develop courses with the potential for cross-registration aimed at introducing students to plant biology, physiology and the study of spatial patterns in natural landscapes.
