Professor, Evolutionary Biology
Mitch Cruzan, Ph.D., specializes in the evolutionary biology of plants and human origins, conservation biology, invasive species, and plant adaptation to climate change.
Cruzan's lab studies ecological and evolutionary processes in plants including adaptation and speciation using field and genomic methods. The lab's current research focuses on the ecological genomics of seed dispersal, invasive species, hybridization, and processes of mutation accumulation in plants.
He is the author of the upcoming book on the evolutionary biology of human origins, Looking Down the Tree - The Evolutionary Biology of Human Origins, Oxford University Press, set to release in Summer 2025.