Kirsten Bomblies is an Assistant Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences. Her current interests evolved on a winding path. After living in four countries, on three continents, in three U.S. states, and as nomads in a motor home for several years throughout North America, her family finally settled in Castle Rock, Colorado. She has spent extensive time outdoors roaming the hills and riding her horse. It was out exploring the ridges and mesas that her love of biology began to develop. However, the “what do I want to be when I grow up?” question was still alternately answered with astronomer, wildlife veterinarian, artist, anthropologist, archaeologist, writer, architect… the problem was she loved everything. Finally her fascination with biology and biochemistry triumphed and she majored in these fields as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, where she received a B.A. in 1996. She worked subsequently for three years as a research assistant at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA, in Detlef Weigel’s group. She and her colleagues researched flower development using Arabidopsis thaliana as a model. From there, she moved in 1999 to join the Ph.D. program in Genetics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. There she worked in John Doebley’s group, which focuses on understanding the genetics of maize domestication.

She received her PhD in 2004 and moved on to a postdoctoral position in Detlef Weigel’s group, now at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tuebingen, Germany. It was during her postdoctoral fellowship that she found her current interest in understanding the molecular mechanisms of plant adaptation to the environment and the genetic consequences of population divergence. Together with a number of colleagues and collaborators, they demonstrated that a common hybrid inviability phenomenon in plants is caused by hyperactivation of the plant immune system. They also wrote several articles elaborating the hypothesis that adaptive divergence in the components of the plant immune system could result in genetic incompatibilities among plant lineages, and might, in some circumstances, promote speciation. In 2008, near the end of her postdoctoral tenure, she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

In her group at Harvard, she plans to pursue two related but distinct lines of research. First, her group will continue working on the consequences of plant immune system evolution using Arabidopsis thaliana. Initially they plan to focus in particular on improving our understanding of the molecular underpinnings of plant autoimmunity.

She is also keen to elucidate how the environment, especially temperature, impacts the function of this self/non-self surveillance system over an individual’s life, as well as over evolutionary time. Her group is also using several different approaches to investigate population structure and adaptation to different habitats in a closely related species, Arabidopsis arenosa.