Benjamin Blackman is an Assistant Professor of Plant and Microbial Biology, University of California, Berkeley. His research seeks to understand how plant development and its ability to respond to changing environmental conditions evolve. Using molecular, genomic and field approaches to connect genes to traits and ecology, his lab aims to address fundamental questions about the genetics of adaptation, the evolution of development, and mechanisms of gene-environment interaction in two plant groups, sunflower and monkeyflower. His work currently focuses on the environmental and circadian regulation of solar tracking by sunflower stems, transcriptomic and ancient DNA studies of sunflower domestication, and the ecological genetics of adaptation to local climates along environmental gradients.