Ithaca College

Adam has received a research grant from the Rochester Academy of Science.

This is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing its members and the community with a means to study and learn about astronomy, anthropology, the life sciences, minerals, and fossils.

The funds will be used to support his research with Susan Swensen.

Adam's project is a evolutionary genetic analysis of a group of plants in the genus Gurania that belong to the pumpkin family.  These plants are flowering Neotropical vines that are found in Central and South America.  Early in their life, the vines produce male flowers and climb up into the canopy.  Once they reach a certain size, the vines begin to produce female flowers in pendulous inflourescences that are visited by hummingbirds and butterflies.  They also serve as hosts to fruit flies in the genus Blepharoneura where as many as seven different species of flies may parasitize a single species of Gurania.  Currently, there is no clear picture of evolutionary relationships in this group of plants.  Adam is working to decipher these relationships using DNA sequences from the chloroplast genome.