Karolina Heyduk, assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology was awarded a $578,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.   

For the award “Collaborative Research: RUI: Quantizing the functional trait spectrum: CAM photosynthesis, life history and nitrogen cycling in the diverse Neotropical bromeliads,” Heyduk will collaborate with the New York Botanical Garden and Colorado College.  

The project will focus on understanding how bromeliads, a family of plants that includes pineapples, adapt to nitrogen limitation.  The goal is to understand why species grow in the places that they do depending on how they get and distribute limited resources.   

The research could be critical to understanding plant survival in tropical regions as climate change rapidly changes their environment.  

The interdisciplinary team made up of members from UConn and the partner institutions will engage with researchers from high school onward across multiple disciplines including genomics, physiology, and ecology to train a new generation of scientists in collaborative, greenhouse-based research.