Jim Marden

picture of me

Professor
Dept. of Biology
&
Assoc. Dir. Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences

Penn State University
208 Mueller Lab
University Park, PA 16802

Phone: 814- 863-1384
    Fax: 814-865-9131
    Email: jhm10 at psu.edu

Some highlights:

Featured in Research Features magazine (article)

NSF Plant Genomes project to improve disease resistance in cacao (article).

New foray into ecological genomics of tropical trees yields first paper (link)

Origin and diversification of insect wings, as revealed by RNAi and transcriptomics in a hemipteran insect (online pub)

Review and new perspective on why metabolic enzyme loci are so frequently targets of selection (online pub)

Genetic variation affecting the hypoxia inducible pathway affects insect tracheal development, phyisology and ecology (online pub)

Fossil evidence for a surface skimming insect in the Carboniferous (online pub).

Marden presents 14th Annual Strickland Memorial Lecture in Entomology at U. of Alberta on Evol of Insect Flight

Schilder (co-authors Kimball, Marden & Jefferson) wins Best Poster award at Amer. Physiol. Soc. meeting

Plenary lecture presented at French Workshop on Robotics, CNRS Institute

Schilder wins Scholander Award from American Physiological Society for work from his PhD at PSU; publishes invited commentary in J. Diabetes Sci. Tech.

1999-2015: Seven papers in four different sections of PNAS (Physiology, Evolution, Genetics, Engineering)

Research Interests:

My research interests are highly integrative, spanning physiological ecology, functional genomics, evolutionary ecology, biomechanics, and behavior. In the most general terms, I am interested in how organisms work, and why they work that way. I investigate mechanistic details of physiology, along with ecological and historical reasons why particular physiological mechanisms have evolved.

Projects underway in my laboratory concentrate on using transcriptome and genome data from ecologically important species to inform physiological and mechanistic studies that further our understanding of how organisms operate and evolve in nature. Using that approach, we are presently examining the respiratory and energetic physiology in a butterfly (Melitaea cinxia) that is a model system for metapopulation biology. In another collaborative project (with Liza Comita, Scott Mangan, and Claude dePamphilis, working with the Forest Dynamics Plot in Panama) we are examining how reductions in local population size affect allelic diversity of pathogen resistance genes of tropical rainforest trees, and how that affects plant-pathogen interactions. Results from our work on wild tropical trees led to a collaboration to improve disease resistance in cacao (with Mark Guiltinan, Seila Maximova and others).

Another longstanding and ongoing project involves the evolution of insect flight using stoneflies and other hemimetabolous insects. I am collaborating with Dr. Aleks Popadic and his students at Wayne State Univesity; we are combining RNAi and transcriptomic approaches to examine the origin and diversification of insect wings.