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B. Rosemary Grant is a Senior Research Biologist, Emeritus at Princeton University, where her research focuses on the maintenance of phenotypic variation, the process of speciation, and natural environments. Together with her husband, Peter Grant, she has been studying Darwin’s finches in the Galápagos Islands since 1973. Their work combines elements of ecology, behavior, genetics, and genomics. Intensive fieldwork conducted over ten years on Genovesa Island and forty years on Daphne Major has revealed the role of natural selection in evolutionary change among finch populations faced with severe droughts and food shortages. They discovered that gene exchange through hybridization can lead to the collapse of species under certain circumstances, as well as the formation of new species. Their research primarily utilizes island environments that are entirely natural and undisturbed by humans, providing a model for understanding evolution in contemporary times and biological diversification over geological time scales. Among the questions she continues to pursue with collaborators are the effects of introgressive hybridization on the underlying genetic composition, as well as known changes in beak morphology and body size of the finches.
GRE scores are not accepted. Ph.D. is the primary degree; students are not required to hold an M.S.E. prior to admission.