User:BTCampers/Barbara Rosemary Grant

Barbara Rosemary Grant
Barbara Rosemary Grant was born on October 8th, 1936 and is married to similarly well-known, Peter Raymond Grant. Both of whom are evolutionary biologists. She currently holds the status of emeritus at Princeton University. She is best-known for her research with Darwin’s finches on the Galápagos Islands - initiated in 1973 - where she routinely captured, tagged, and drew blood from finches on Daphne Major. Perhaps most notably, Barbara Rosemary Grant and her husband’s research portrayed the morphological response of natural selection within less than a life of research. Their results were an early example of how quickly populations can respond to selective pressures.

Early Life
Barbara Rosemary Grant grew up in Arnside, England. Through examination of her homeland’s natural diversity and particularly plant fossils, she developed an interest in thinking about what drove their diversity in structure. She read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species at an early age and developed an influential relationship with Charlotte Auerbach that helped shape her decision to attend university after boarding school. She received a degree in zoology in 1960 from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Grant later deferred her PhD at the University of Edinburgh to take a teaching position at the University of British Columbia where she met Peter Grant. They were soon married in 1962.

Career
A two-year study on Daphne Major beginning in 1973 developed into several decades of research. The focus of the Grants were to delimit evolutionary processes and environmental factors contributing to the diversification of Darwin’s finches from their mainland ancestor. Daphne Major was an ideal location to study this adaptive radiation because of its status as a natural laboratory (i.e. isolated and not inhabited by humans). The magnitude of these findings – observing natural selection in several decades - contributed to the reputation of Grant as an influential evolutionary biologist.

Grant transitioned her work on Daphne Major to a smaller more peripheral island in the Galápagos archipelago by pursuing a PhD through Uppsala University’s Staffan Ulfstrand. There, she studied how finches evolved in an even more isolated environment by examining morphological variation in the large cactus finch (Geospiza conirostris). She discovered that selective pressures operated through competition involving food availability in a changing environment and that hybridization persisted in finch lineages occupying overlapping niche space.