Dr Alexander Bowles
Research Fellow, Department of Biology
About
Dr Alexander Bowles’ research is broadly interested in understanding the extraordinary diversity of life. In particular, this focusses on plants and their changing relationships with water over the last billion years of evolution. In his work, he uses a range of molecular, computational and morphological analyses of living and fossil plants. These experiments aim to answer questions about how plant innovations originated millions of years ago, how they work today, and how they might be (mal)adaptive in the future.
Expertise
- Dr Bowles explores how plant and algal species have changed and diversified over millions of years, uncovering the patterns and processes that drive their long-term evolution
- By comparing the genomes of different plant and algal species, Dr Bowles identifies key genetic differences and similarities that help explain how plants adapt to their environments
- Dr Bowles reconstructs the evolutionary 'family tree' of plants and algae to understand how they are related, when they diverged, and how their traits have evolved over time
Selected publications
Recent media work
- How glacier algae are challenging the way we think about evolution (The Conversation, 2024)
- How ancient plants ‘learnt’ to use water when they moved on to land – new research (The Conversation, 2022)
- We found the genes that allowed plants to colonise land 500 million years ago (The Conversation, 2020)
Languages
English