Ian S. Gilman
Department of Biology, Fairfield University
BNW 236E, Bannow Science Center
1073 North Benson Road
Fairfield, Connecticut 06824
I’m a faculty member in the Department of Biology at Fairfield University. My research examines major evolutionary shifts in plant photosynthetic metabolism — particularly C4 photosynthesis and Crassulacean acid metabolism (CAM) — and uses these shifts as general models for how complex traits evolve. My approach spans scales, from single-cell/single-nuclei sequencing of individual species to developing new phylogenomic and comparative methods. See current projects and publications for more.
news
| Apr 20, 2026 | The Plant Resilience Institue at Michigan State awarded a seed grant to me and VanBuren Lab PhD candidate Jenny Schuster. Our project “Defining transcriptional cell states in desiccation tolerant plants with spatial RNAseq” will leverage a new 10X Visium machine at the RTSF Genomics Core to integrate spatial RNAseq into our single cell research on desiccation tolerant plants. |
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| Dec 02, 2025 | I accepted a position to join the Biology Department at Fairfield University next fall as an assistant professor!. |
| Aug 01, 2024 | “Convergent evolution of desiccation tolerance in grasses” (Marks, Pas, Schuster, Gilman & VanBuren) published in Nature Plants. |
| Jan 01, 2024 | “Predicting photosynthetic pathway from anatomy using machine learning” (Gilman, Heyduk, Maya-Lastra, Hancock & Edwards) published in New Phytologist. |