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: I am currently a PhD candidate in the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology department at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Co-advisors Drs. Kurt Schwenk & Carl Schlichting head my committee– which also includes 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). Raising one species of animal under different conditions can reveal whether developmental variation is affected by that environment. Raising related species under the same set of different environments can reveal whether their response to the environment has evolved. Together with detailed knowledge of the animals' environments and the results of a variety of performance tests, the adaptive nature of all this variation can be used to interpret evolution.
