Chris Muir

Biography

Chris is an evolutionary biologist and plant ecophysiologist in the Department of Botany at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He integrates experiments, comparative methods, and theory to study how organisms adapt to their environment. Organisms are functionally constrained by physical and chemical laws, yet natural selection has produced seemingly endless forms within these fundamental limits. Contemporary climate change is pushing species inexorably against these limits, potentially leading to adaptive evolution on ecological timescales. Chris and his group are motivated to understand how natural selection in the past led to the diversity of forms we observe today and use that knowledge to predict how organisms will respond to climate change.