Joan Roughgarden (born 13 March 1946) is an American ecologist and evolutionary biologist. She has engaged in theory and observation of coevolution and competition in Anolis lizards of the Caribbean, and recruitment limitation in the rocky intertidal zones of California and Oregon. She has more recently become known for her rejection of sexual selection, her theistic evolutionism, and her work on holobiont evolution.
Personal life and education Roughgarden was born in Paterson, New Jersey, United States. She received a Bachelor of Science in biology (with Distinction and Phi Beta Kappa) and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy with highest honors from University of Rochester in 1968 and later a Ph.D. in biology from Harvard University in 1971. In 1998, Roughgarden came out as transgender and changed her name to Joan, making a coming out post on her website on her 52nd birthday.
Career Roughgarden worked as an instructor and assistant professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts Boston from 1970 to 1972. In 1972 she joined the faculty of the Department of Biology at Stanford University. After becoming full professor she retired in 2011, and became emeritus professor. She founded and directed the Earth Systems Program at Stanford and has received awards for service to undergraduate education. In 2012 she moved to Hawaii, where she became an adjunct professor at the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology. In her academic career, Roughgarden advised 20 Ph.D. students and 15 postdoctoral fellows. Roughgarden has authored books and over 180 scientific articles. In addition to a textbook on ecological and evolutionary theory in 1979, Roughgarden has carried out ecological field studies with Caribbean lizards and with barnacles and their larvae along the California coast. In 2015, she wrote the fiction novel Ram-2050, a science-fiction retelling of the Ramayana.
Research
Caribbean Anoles & Interspecific Competition Roughgarden's early work in the 1970s and 80s helped to develop the Anolis lizards of the Caribbean as an important model system for evolution and ecology. For example, she used two-species enclosure experiments on two Caribbean islands to demonstrate increasing strength of interspecific competition as resource partitioning decreases: a central tenet for competition theory. The Anolis system thus provided an early example of an eco-evolutionary feedback, and with further development by Jonathan Losos and others, has become an important example of adaptive radiation.
Barnacles & Recruitment Limitation After setting up a lab at the Hopkins Marine Station, Roughgarden sought to extend her approach of combining theoretical with field research by studying intertidal acorn barnacles (Balanus and Chthamalus spp). Earlier work by Joseph Connell, Bob Paine and others had suggested that the characteristic zonation of rocky intertidal communities was predominantly structured by predation, (for example by Pisaster seastars) and by competition, wherein dominant Balanus species displaced Chthamalus species to the high intertidal zones. Together with her student, Steve Gaines, Roughgarden showed that these interspecific interactions were most important in intertidal localities and communities with a high density of barnacles, such as those Connell and others had studied in Scotland. At Hopkins in Central California, however, barnacle density was lower, and the amount of free space was best explained by periodic pulses of larval recruitment. With her student Sean Connolly, she then showed, through both empirical observation and modeling, that a latitudinal gradient in upwelling along the west coast of North America created very dense barnacle recruitment in the north (Oregon and Washington), where upwelling was weak, and very sparse barnacle recruitment in the south (California), where upwelling was strong. This in turn explained why field studies in the north had found interspecific interactions to be important, while her own field studies in the south had found larval recruitment to be most important for structuring intertidal populations. This deft synthesis helped to drive a paradigm shift in marine ecology which emphasized larval dispersal and recruitment dynamics over adult interactions and favored demographic models of populations open to larval recruits from distant localities, which dominated the field during the 1990s.
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