Rebecca Batstone

"Natural selection cannot possibly produce any modification in one species exclusively for the good of another species" - Darwin 1859

Welcome to my research page!

Photographer: Katrina Kaur

I am currently a Postdoctoral fellow in the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. As a member of the Heath Lab (PI: Katy Heath, Associate Professor in Plant Biology), I am broadly interested in understanding how cooperation among unrelated organisms (a.k.a., mutualism) evolves, and what factors help keep these interactions stable over time. To address these questions, I have mainly used the legume-rhizobium system to conduct several manipulative laboratory and field-based experiments, which you can learn more about by clicking the "Projects" tab. If you want to know more about why I study mutualism, and my thoughts on other mutualism-related topics, check out my blog!

An updated copy of my CV can be found here.

Updates:

Photo credit: Chaitanya Gokhale

Nov 1-3 2017: My supervisor Megan Frederickson has been selected to be a plenary speaker at an upcoming workshop in Plön, Germany - The Biology and Economics of Mutualisms. My lab mate Jason Laurich and I will be presenting at the meeting as well, and we are super excited to meet everyone!