About the Speaker
Dr. James Marden is a biology professor at the Pennsylvania State University and Associate Director of the Huck Institute of the Life Sciences. He is interested in how organisms work, and why they work that way.
Dr. Marden investigates physiological mechanisms, ecological and historical reasons why particular physiological mechanisms have evolved, and how physiological variation within species affects their ecology. He has worked primarily with insects because they are readily available, fantastically diverse, and ecologically/economically important. He has recently begun to work also on plants, with a particular interest in allelic variation in the pathogen resistance genes of tropical trees.