John Stinchcombe

Natural Sciences Fellow, SCAS.
Distinguished Professor of Ecological Genetics, University of Toronto

John Stinchcombe holds a PhD in Biology from Duke University (Durham, NC), which he received
in 2001. He then worked at Brown University from 2001–2005 as a post-doctoral fellow, training with
Johanna Schmitt. He started a faculty position at the University of Toronto, in the, then, Botany Depart-
ment. He joined the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at its inception, where he has been
since. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Ecological Genetics, and has been the Director of the
University of Toronto's field station, the Koffler Scientific Reserve, since 2013. He previously served as
Secretary for the Society for the Study of Evolution.

Stinchcombe is known for his work in plant ecological genetics, specifically in the areas of how natural
selection and genetics interact to facilitate or constrain evolution. His work together with his research
group spans quantitative genetics, traditional Mendelian genetics, and genomics and transcriptomics. In
these areas, he has contributed several important empirical studies, synthetic and agenda-setting reviews,
as well as novel statistical and theoretical methods. A major interest has been in measuring natural selection
in the field, and statistical methods associated with that. He has published over 100 papers in a wide range
of journals, including Science, PNAS, eLife, and Proceedings of the Royal Society (B). He also publishes in
leading conceptual journals for plant evolutionary biology, including Evolution, New Phytologist, and Mole-
cular Ecology. He currently serves on the editorial boards of New Phytologist and PRSB, and has previously
served on the editorial board of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.

At SCAS, Stinchcombe will be working on techniques for measuring natural selection on gene expression,
using transcriptomic data. 

John Stinchcombe is in residence in the autumn of 2023.
This information is accurate as of the academic year 2023-24.