Location: Meeting room 1007, No. 11 building (Administration building) in Guanggu campus

Dr. Samuel Brockington is the Curator of the Cambridge University Botanic Gardens and a Lecturer in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the evolution of many aspects of land plants and he is particularly interested in the genomic basis of organismal and trait diversity. He gained a PhD at the Florida Museum of Natural History, and returned to Cambridge as a Marie Curie Fellow and subsequently as a NERC Independent Research Fellow. Since establishing his own research group in 2014, he has foucused on two research topics. The first, tackles the evolution of the cuticle, a thin waxy layer that covers the epidermal surface of all land plants, and an essential innovation that allowed the green algae to colonize the land. the second is a genome sequencing initiative funded by the National Science Foundation. Here, together with collaborators in the USA, he seeks to understand the relationship between genomic diversity and the evolution of extreme adaptation in the plant order Caryophyllales.