Eve Emshwiller

Eve Emshwiller’s research interests center on the ethnobotany, evolution, and conservation of crop plants and their wild relatives. Her research has focused principally on the origin of polyploidy, domestication, and ongoing evolution of the Andean tuber crop “oca,” Oxalis tuberosa, and its wild allies. Her current research includes an international collaborative project on phylogeny of the genus Oxalis and a study of the distribution of clonal genotypes of cultivated oca as an example of the evolution of clonally-propagated crops under human influence. She has been a faculty member in the Department of Botany at University of Wisconsin - Madison since August 2006. Previously she was Adjunct Curator of Economic Botany at the Field Museum in Chicago for ~7.5 years. Between her two stints as a student at Cornell (graduate student in the 1990s, undergrad in the mid-1970s), she lived in Maine for 12 years and worked in gardens and greenhouses. Most of her field work to date has been conducted in the central Andean region, including a student Fulbright year in Peru in 1996-7, and a Fulbright Scholar Grant in Bolivia that began in September 2013. She has been active in the Society for Economic Botany, recently serving as its 2009-2010 president.