Vivian Irish

portrait of Vivian Irish

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Vivian Irish is Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University.  As a graduate student at Harvard University she focused on characterizing the developmental genetic mechanisms specifying dorsal-ventral polarity in Drosophila.  She continued to pursue these interests in developmental patterning processes as a Jane Coffin Childs postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge with Michael Akam, where she began to think about comparative approaches to developmental questions. As an NSF postdoctoral fellow at Yale University with Ian Sussex, she turned her attention to exploring patterning processes in the Arabidopsis flower. Now a faculty member at Yale, she is interested in characterizing the genes and pathways regulating organogenesis and growth in the flower. She has also explored the extent to which these pathways are conserved across different flowering plant species with an emphasis on understanding how gene and genome changes result in evolutionary diversification.

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