Dr Luke Mander

Biography

I received a PhD in 2010 from University College Dublin for a thesis that investgated 200 million-year-old fossil plant remains in Jameson Land, East Greenland. My doctoral research was supervised by Jennifer McElwain and Wolfram Kürschner. I then spent two years as a postdoc in Surangi Punyasena's lab in the Department of Plant Biology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, before returning to the UK for a six-month stay at Plymouth University as a Lecturer in Earth Sciences (Fixed Term). I rounded off my scientific training with a two-year EU Marie Curie fellowship in Tim Lenton's Earth System Science group at the University of Exeter.

Research Interest

My current research activities are focused on plant morphology. I am interested in quantifying the morphology of plants, investigating the physiological and environmental consequences of morphological variation between individuals and between taxa, and classifying plants on the basis of their morphological characteristics. I work with both living plants and material from the plant fossil record, which represents a vast archive of morphological novelties and natural design solutions that have been produced over the course of evolutionary time. In this context, I am particularly interested in the evolution of tropical rainforests, which are among the most complex ecosytems on Earth. I have worked mostly with pollen grains, which are morphologically fascinating objects with an outstanding fossil record, but I am now also working with the leaves of vascular plants. Recent papers have presented a combinatorial morphospace for angiosperm pollen and algorithmic methods to quantify self-organised vegetation patterns in dryland ecosystems.