Dr. Belinda Chang

Biography

Belinda Chang is a Professor in the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology department at the University of Toronto. She holds an AB from Princeton and a PhD from Harvard, followed by postdoctoral work at Harvard and Rockefeller University. Her research program is primarily focused on the evolution of vision from a molecular perspective. Specifically, her laboratory studies the evolution of visual pigments and the sensory visual pathways in animals. The research involves a variety of molecular methods to investigate how these pigments affect the way organisms perceive and interact with their environment. Chang's lab conducts comparative studies of visual pigments from various organisms and aims to recreate ancestral proteins in order to infer the evolutionary properties of these pigments. By expressing artificially synthesized ancestral genes, the lab explores the evolutionary implications behind current visual functions in present-day proteins. Furthermore, she is currently accepting MSc and PhD students for her research team.

Research Interests

Experience