Chloe Drummond

Chloe Pak Drummond is an evolutionary botanist interested in biogeographic patterns of North American plants. She focuses on plant species with a disjunct, or discontinuous, geographic distribution in western North America and the Great Lakes region. To illuminate the ways in which biogeography and evolution interact, she tests the evolutionary history of these disjunct species to understand how and when they arrived at their current distributions, persistence of Great Lakes region populations in the face of climate change, and whether geographic heterogeneity facilitates local adaptations of ecologically and economically important plant traits. She works with students to answer these integrated evolutionary questions using molecular and bioinformatic techniques.