Profile of Johanna Schmitt.

Abstract

Understanding and predicting the adaptive evolution of complex traits in variable natural environments are central problems in plant evolutionary biology that motivate much of Johanna Schmitt’s research. Her work, which integrates plant evolutionary ecology, physiological ecology, and ecological genomics, has made significant contributions toward understanding the genetic basis of ecologically important plant traits and predicting plant responses to environmental change. The findings enable Schmitt, who was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2008, and other scientists to determine how plants respond to ongoing climate change. Johanna Schmitt. Image courtesy of John Abromowski (Brown University, Providence, RI). Schmitt's team measured the fitness of many A. thaliana lines from across the species' climate range in Europe. Here, the plants experience a hard frost in Cologne, Germany Image courtesy of Brook Moyers (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada). Growing up in a suburb of Philadelphia, Schmitt spent a lot of time outdoors. Her father, a computer engineer, taught her about the planets and constellations. She also collected and studied insects. “One of my earliest scientific memories is catching a handful of fireflies and putting them in a Mason jar overnight,” she says. “The next morning, I found a single large firefly alive, and deduced from the random body parts remaining in the jar that I had captured a ‘cannibal firefly.’” She learned that she had captured a female Photuris pennsylvanicus , adapted to lure hapless Photinus pyralis males as prey by imitating the characteristic mating flash of Photinus females. This and other early natural history lessons foreshadowed her lifelong research interest in processes of natural selection and adaptive evolution. An early mentor was Ralph Heister, Schmitt’s high school biology teacher. Schmitt says, “He taught scientific method by taking us in the field to sample biota upstream and downstream from a factory …