Daru’s research leverages herbarium specimens as untapped sources of plant functional traits to explore shifting functional biogeography across ecological scales. His recent work on seagrasses, being the only flowering plants to secondarily transition to sea during the early evolution of monocots, which moves his research from patterns of plant distributions to the underlying functional and evolutionary processes driving these patterns. Barnabas Daru completed his PhD at University of Johannesburg. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, and is currently an Assistant Professor at Stanford University. Daru’s research has contributed to our understanding of plant diversity from local to global scales where he develops new methods and tools in combination with large-scale data to advance understanding about the patterns and processes underlying plant species distributions.
