Speaker Bio: Amy Denton has been a biology professor at California State University Channel Islands since 2003. Originally from New York, she received her Ph.D. in botany from the University of Washington. She then became a National Science Foundation/Alfred P. Sloan postdoctoral fellow in molecular evolution at UC Riverside and faculty in the University of Alaska Fairbank Department of Biology & Wildlife and herbarium curator at the UAF Museum of the North. Dr. Denton uses comparative DNA sequences to study how climate and geology have influenced the evolution and distribution of arctic and alpine plant populations and their genes. Decades of plant hunting for research have taken her to field locations in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, Tibet, México, Argentina and to arctic North America, Iceland (where she discovered her love for birds!), Greenland, Svalbard, and Antarctica. In addition to her undergraduate classes, Amy teaches lifelong learning courses on the history of science, flora and fauna of mountain and polar regions, evolutionary biology, and climate change. Locally, she is on the Board of Directors of the Ojai Valley Defense Fund and an animal care volunteer and member of the Education Team at the Ojai Raptor Center.