Biography

Adam Roddy is a plant biologist who studies the relationship between plants and the environment. This work broadly addresses questions about how energy and matter move between the biosphere and atmosphere across spatial and temporal scales. At the same time, he addresses basic physical and philosophical questions about the nature of living systems and the transient boundaries between organism and environment. He employs a variety of methods to answer these questions, including genomics, anatomy, physiology, biomechanics, and evolutionary biology. Three major themes have defined much of this work: (1) examining how genome size and structure influence organismal form, function, and evolution under different climate regimes, (2) developing a physiological and biogeochemical understanding of flowers, and (3) characterizing how complex, multivariate natural selection generates and maintains biodiversity. Most recently, and in collaboration with philosophers of science and cognitive scientists, he has been reconsidering how our own biases influence the capacities we are willing to ascribe to plants. Prior to NYU, he taught at Florida International University and was a research scientist at Yale University.