April 2024 Funk Lecture

Barnabas Daru is an Assistant Professor of Biology at Stanford University. Research in his lab focuses on the broad patterns of plant diversity across ecological scales and disentangling the processes underlying such distributions, from past environments to future global change. His lab also develops analytical tools that are widely used. Barnabas was first drawn to biogeography as a child, when he spent hours exploring the volcanic mountains near his hometown in Kerang, Nigeria. He went on to complete a Bachelor’s degree in zoology from the University of Jos, and a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Johannesburg. In his doctoral work, he identified new biodiversity hotspots for woody plants in southern Africa. Following his PhD, Barnabas pursued a postdoc at Harvard University, where he explored the unrealized potentials of herbarium collections for addressing questions in ecology and evolutionary biology. He started by measuring biodiversity and addressing the issues of collections bias within and among regions. In his most recent work, he assembled an unprecedented global database of native plant distributions, which includes range maps for over 200,000 plant species. Using this database, he quantified the impact of climate change on plant biogeographic boundaries and explored biotic interchange of plants in historical and contemporary times. Barnabas is the author of more than 45 scientific publications in top-tier journals, including Nature, Nature Communications and PNAS. He is also a passionate educator and mentor, and he is committed to promoting biogeography to individuals from historically marginalized populations. When he’s not in the lab, Daru enjoys swimming and hiking with his wife and two young kids.