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Education

2010 Florida State University, B.S.
2018 Florida State University, Ph.D.

Courses Taught

General Biology
General Biology Laboratory

Career Specialties

Joseph Landy is an evolutionary ecologist. More specifically, he studies how environmental variation and genetic factors combine to shape the evolutionary trajectory of a population. His work has focused on understanding how populations adapt over a contemporary time scale (<10 years).

Professional and Community Activities

Landy's current research examines how an invasive species influenced the evolution of Daphnia (water fleas) populations in multiple lakes in Wisconsin. Landy and his colleagues resurrected Daphnia from resting eggs found deep in the lake sediment. These eggs were produced as far back as the 1990s and represent a snapshot of the population before the invasive species arrived in 2009. In the laboratory, they compared these resurrected Daphnia to the current-day population. The results of this project are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (Landy et al. 2020).

In his other line of research, Landy is studying how the genetic correlations between males and females might limit the ability of a population to adapt to environmental change. Here he is using natural populations of guppies found in the mountains of Trinidad to address this research question. The broad scope of this project incorporates methodologies from numerous fields including quantitative genetics, population biology, bioinformatics, and morphometrics.

*Landy, J. A., Oschmann, A., Munch, S. B., & Walsh, M. R. (2020). Ancestral genetic variation in phenotypic plasticity underlies rapid evolutionary changes in resurrected populations of waterfleas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(51), 32535-32544.