She is also pursuing a research collaboration with Duke computer science Professor Carlo Tomasi and University of California, Davis, entomology Professor Emily Meineke to apply machine learning and computer vision algorithms to investigate long-term insect-plant interactions preserved on digitized herbarium specimens. She notes that though ferns date back about 400 million years, 80% of today’s fern species can be traced to an evolutionary burst 100 million years ago, when they diversified in the shadow of flowering plants.
Much of my work focuses on the ‘seed-free’ vascular plants – ferns and lycophytes – two under-studied clades that provide a critical point of comparison for understanding the evolution of their closest relatives, the seed plants.”Īmong her current research is understanding the evolutionary relationships of ancient land plants, especially ferns and horsetails, by integrating evidence from morphology, molecules (DNA sequence data from multiple genes) and the fossil record. Pryer describes herself as “an evolutionary biologist who uses phylogenetic tools to study plants. She earned her bachelor’s degree from McGill University in Québec and her master’s from the University of Guelph in Ontario. from Duke, served as the curator at the Field Museum in Chicago from 1996 to 2001, then returned to Duke as a faculty member. in the Hampton-Newport News Room at Webb University Center.
Kathleen Pryer, biology professor and director of the herbarium at Duke University.
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