Angiosperms: pollen, evolution and ecosystems

Talk by Dr Luke Mander, Senior Lecturer, The Open University

Abstract

Luke’s works 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, he is particularly interested in the evolution of tropical rainforests, which are among the most complex ecosytems on Earth. He has worked mostly with pollen grains, which are morphologically fascinating objects with an outstanding fossil record, but also work with the leaves of vascular plants.

His current research activities are focused on plant palaeobiology and morphology.

He is interested in quantifying the morphology of plants, classifying plants on thebasis of their morphological characteristics, and investigating the biogeographical evolution of plant diversity.

Biography

Luke received a PhD in 2010 from University College Dublin for a thesis that investigated 200 million-year-old fossil plant remains in East Greenland. He then spent two years as a postdoc in the Department of Plant Biology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I returned to the UK with a two-year EU Marie Curie fellowship in the Earth System Science group at the University of Exeter. He has been a lecturer at The Open University since 2015.

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