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, was a National Science Foundation/Alfred P. Sloan postdoctoral fellow in molecular evolution at UC Riverside, then faculty in the University of Alaska Fairbanks Department of Biology & Wildlife and herbarium curator at the UAF Museum of the North. Amy’s research uses DNA to study evolution and distribution of arctic and alpine plant populations. Decades of plant hunting for DNA collection have taken her to field locations in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, Tibet, México, Argentina and to arctic North America, Iceland, Greenland, Svalbard,and Antarctica. In addition to her CSUCI undergraduate courses, Amy teaches lifelong learning courses on the history of science, flora and fauna of mountain and polar regions, evolutionary biology, and climate change. Amy discovered her love for birds on a field trip to Iceland and enjoys finding and observing them locally and wherever she travels.