Education
B.S. Allegheny College; M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., Columbia University

• Plant Ecophysiology
• Community Dynamics
• Climate Change
• Biological Invasions

As a plant physiological ecologist with a liberal arts background, Dr. Boyd views teaching and research as tightly linked.

Her teaching philosophy is centered on actively engaging students in the process of science by using an inquiry-based, hands-on approach. This active approach allows students to develop both collaborative and independent problem-solving and communication skills, all while challenging them to think creatively and critically and encouraging them to learn skills rather than simply accumulate facts.

She strives to provide students with opportunities to learn through the applied process of conducting research within the context of her courses.

As a researcher, Dr. Boyd utilizes a combination of descriptive and experimental approaches to pursue her broad interests in plant ecology. This breadth of interests and approaches allows her to develop and test hypotheses about environmental factors that influence plant success at organismal, population and community scales.

Her research provides information useful for addressing important ecological and environmental issues that could influence, or be influenced by, changes in community structure and affiliated community-level processes at local to global scales. The ability to evaluate and predict changes in plant community structure in response to environmental changes could facilitate effective management and/or protection strategies with long-term implications for conservation of biological diversity and related biological processes.

Dr. Boyd's graduate research focused on attempting to elucidate physiological mechanisms that enhance plant species success at the community level in various ecosystems, including wetland, forest and desert. In particular, she compared physiological responses of co-existing native and invasive plant species to environmental variables to see if those responses could enhance the success of the invaders.

She received a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship from the National Park Service to study intraseasonal plant community dynamics in Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina with researchers from the University of Tennessee.

In a related side project, she compared the physiology of native and invasive forest understory plants locally at Cape Cod National Seashore. Dr. Boyd's research has been published in journals including Ecology, New Phytologist , American Journal of Botany, Biological Invasions, and Tree Physiology . She has given a number of related presentations at the annual meetings of the Ecological Society of America, of which she is a member.

Dr. Boyd is teaching the following courses: Comparative Physiology, Ecology and Organisms.

Boyd enjoys the outdoors, photography, and spending time with her baby daughter, husband and dog.

Visit the Botany department Web site.