Tobias Landberg

Doctoral Student

Office: BioPharmacy 410
Voice: (860) 486-4158
E-mail: tobias.landberg@uconn.edu

Mailing address:
75 N. Eagleville Road, U-3043
Storrs, CT 06269

About: Tobias is currently a PhD candidate in the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology department at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. He is co-advised by Drs. Kurt Schwenk and Carl Schlichting. His thesis committee is rounded out by Drs. Elizabeth Jockusch and Kentwood Wells.

Research: "Evolutionary-developmental-functional-eco-morphology" was the joke term I coined with my good friend Manny Azizi to cover our interests. In a nutshell, it's about unraveling the mobius strip of how organisms perform their behaviors, how sources of variation affect that performance, and how that performance affects evolution. The three main sources of variation in nature are ontogenetic (or developmental), ecological (or environmental) and phylogenetic (or evolutionary or genetic). The basic method was stolen from botanists and hence is referred to as the "common garden" approach. Raising different species of animals under the same conditions can reveal whether differences seen in nature are due to the environment or underlying genetics. Raising different species in a variety of environments can reveal whether their response to the environment has evolved. Combining detailed knowledge of the animals' environments with the results of a variety of performance tests, the adaptive nature of all this developmental variation can then be used to understand evolution.