Dr. Heather Wilkinson
College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
h-wilkinson@tamu.edu

Heather H. Wilkinson received a Bachelor of Arts in Biology and a Master of Arts in Teaching from Boston University. In 1996 she received her Ph.D. in Biology, with an emphasis on evolutionary ecology, from the State University of New York. In 1995 she began as a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of Kentucky, and in 1997 was promoted to Assistant Research Professor in the same department. She joined the Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology at Texas A&M in 1999 as an Assistant Professor. She received tenure and promotion in 2005. In her research program she has emphasized graduate and undergraduate training opportunities. She serves as a Sloan Foundation mentor. Dr. Wilkinson has received research funding from the National Science Foundation, the United States Department of Agriculture, the Texas Corn Growers Association, the Department of Energy, AgriLife Research, and the Vice President of Research at Texas A&M. She studies both microbial communities associated with extreme environments and microbial genes and gene networks involved in adaptive responses to the environment. She teaches U.S. Environmental Regulations and Sampling and Environmental Monitoring in the Bioenvironmental Sciences major. She serves as the faculty advisor for the National Association of Environmental Professionals student club. She is a member of many interdisciplinary faculties at Texas A&M including Genetics, Program for the Biology of Filamentous Fungi, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.