Chloe Pak Drummond, Ph.D., is an evolutionary botanist who investigates biogeographic patterns of North American plants. She focuses on plant species with a disjunct, or discontinuous, geographic distribution between western North America and the Great Lakes region.
To illuminate the many ways in which geography and evolution interact, she tests the evolutionary history of these disjunct species to understand how and when they arrived at their current distributions, the future persistence of Great Lakes region populations in the face of climate change, and whether geographic heterogeneity is facilitating local adaptations of ecologically and economically important plant traits. She draws on molecular and bioinformatic techniques and works with students and collaborators to answer these integrated evolutionary questions. Dr. Drummond is currently a visiting lecturer in the Department of Biological Science at Mount Holyoke College teaching introductory biology, plant biogeography, and genomics and bioinformatics.