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By Joe Garvey

Kathleen Pryer, biology professor and director of the at Duke University, will discuss “Ferns: Flourishing in the Shadow of Flowering Plants” as the Lytton J. Musselman Natural History Lecture speaker on March 16.

The talk will be held at 7 p.m. in the Hampton-Newport News Room at Webb University Center. You can RSVP at this .

Pryer, who earned her Ph.D. from Duke, served as the curator at the Field Museum in Chicago from 1996 to 2001, then returned to Duke as a faculty member. She earned her bachelor’s degree from McGill University in Québec and her master’s from the University of Guelph in Ontario.

Pryer describes herself as “an evolutionary biologist who uses phylogenetic tools to study plants. Much of my work focuses on the ‘seed-free’ vascular plants – ferns and lycophytes – two under-studied clades that provide a critical point of comparison for understanding the evolution of their closest relatives, the seed plants.”

Among her current research is understanding the evolutionary relationships of ancient land plants, especially ferns and horsetails, by integrating evidence from morphology, molecules (DNA sequence data from multiple genes) and the fossil record. She notes that though ferns date back about 400 million years, 80% of today’s fern species can be traced to an evolutionary burst 100 million years ago, when they diversified in the shadow of flowering plants.

She is also pursuing a research collaboration with Duke computer science Professor Carlo Tomasi and University of California, Davis, entomology Professor Emily Meineke to apply machine learning and computer vision algorithms to investigate long-term insect-plant interactions preserved on digitized herbarium specimens.

Perhaps most notably, Pryer and her team in 2012 named a new genus of ferns found in Arizona, Texas, Mexico and Central and South America after Lady Gaga. “We wanted to name this genus for Lady Gaga because of her fervent defense of equality and individual expression,” she said in a , adding that the fern “has somewhat fluid definitions of gender,” reproducing by spores that can grow into plants that may be male, female or bisexual. The ferns also bore a “striking resemblance” to one of Lady Gaga’s costumes.

She also successfully crowdfunded the sequencing of the first fern genome (Azolla).

Among the honors she’s won are the Outstanding Faculty Award from the Duke University Center for LGBT Life, the Distinguished Teaching and Service Award from the Duke University Department of Biology, the Publisher’s Award for Excellence in Systematic Research from the Society of Systematic Biology, the Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation and the Botanical Society of America’s Edgar T. Wherry Award.

The Lytton J. Musselman Natural History Lecture is a continuing series led by Lytton Musselman, the Mary Payne Hogan professor of botany at ���Ϲ�. The series was launched with the help of a substantial gift from ���Ϲ� alumni Michael and Sue Pitchford. A past student of Musselman's, Michael Pitchford is the former president and chief executive officer of Community Preservation and Development Corp. in Washington, D.C.