2019_claudia_ciotir_cv.doc | |
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I am currently a postdoctoral researcher working under Allison Miller’s supervision in a collaborative partnership between The Land Institute and its Perennial Agriculture Project, Saint Louis University, and the Missouri Botanical Garden.
In this project, we are investigating the incorporation of wild crop relatives into large-scale contemporary agriculture. We develop a global large scale inventory of wild, perennial grain, legume, and oilseed species and evaluate valuable traits that will allow their inclusion in pre-breeding and domestication programs. This includes information gathering, identification of wild plant species for domestication suitability, and seed procurement. We intend to integrate plant trait data into an accessible, relational database in Tropicos. For a set of prioritized candidate species we will initiate field experiments at the Land Institute to design pipeline models of domestication and test basic theory related to the evolution of perennial plant species under intense artificial selection. Some immediate pre-breeding candidates include legume species on which we are planning to evaluate morphological and genetic traits associated with a domestication syndrome.
My PhD. dissertation was undertaken at Trent University in Joanna Freeland’s group and it focused on applying phylogeographic tools to unravel evolutionary histories of disjunct and invasive plant species distributed around the Great Lakes region My other main focus revolves around conservation genetics and species in peril. These interests are linked to my earlier work as conservation biologist at Suceava Genebank in Romania, and to my former MSc specialisation in Plant Diversity Taxonomy and Evolution in U.K.
During my MSc at The University of Reading under the supervision of Dr. Alastair Culham, I identified species of Cyclamen based on four DNA barcodes and I reconstructed phylogenetic relationships of sister species in Subgenus Psilanthum. Severe climatic changes will decrease wild Cyclamen suitable habitats. Based on the predicted habitat area loss, I proposed IUCN threatened categories to enforce conservation of wild Cyclamen species around the Mediterranean Region where they originated 15 mil years ago. See Cyclamen future predictions.
Something dear to me, Cyclamen hederifolium