Karolina Heyduk

Biography

Karolina Heyduk is an assistant professor in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at the University of Connecticut, where she is also the director of the George Safford Torrey Herbarium. Karolina earned her PhD from the University of Georgia in 2015 and held postdoctoral position at the University of Georgia (2015-2018) and Yale University (2018-2019). Prior to starting at the University of Connecticut in 2023, she held an assistant professor appointment at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa (2020-2022). Her research focuses on plant photosynthetic adaptations to stressful environmental conditions. In particular, her research group studies how Crassulacean acid metabolism and other carbon concentrating mechanisms evolve, are regulated by the environment, and how they affect other core processes in plants. Through a combination of plant ecophysiology and comparative genomics, the Heyduk lab focuses on temporal aspects of photosynthesis across the day-night cycle, across seasons, and across evolutionary time.