A/Prof John Baker
Principal Investigator
Contact
Email: John Baker
Phone: +1 508 793 7609
Biosketch
John Baker is an Associate Research Professor at Clark University, USA and jointly leads the Foster/Baker Lab with Susan Foster. Baker received his BS from Northern Illinois University, MS from University of Southern Mississippi and PhD from University of Arkansas. His research interests focus on the life history and ecology of fishes. Over the past 20+ years, Baker's research has centered on the post-glacial adaptive radiation of the threespine stickleback, which offers particularly unique insights. Life-history traits such as offspring size, fecundity, age at reproduction, and patterns of senescence are features especially closely linked to fitness, and freshwater fishes, and the stickleback radiation in particular, provide outstanding opportunities to understand how life histories evolve. In addition, this system is an outstanding one for disentangling the roles of plasticity and standing genetic variation in shaping evolutionary trajectories. Study sites include south-central Alaska, southern British Columbia, and Newfoundland and the lab's 25+ year set of research collections includes nearly 600,000 specimens, making it an incredibly valuable archive for investigating patterns of change through an extended period of rapid natural and human-induced environmental change.