Rate My Professor Lynda Delph

Lynda Delph is a Distinguished Professor of Biology in the Department of Biology at Indiana University Bloomington. She received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from the University of Arizona in 1979 and 1983, respectively, a Ph.D. from the University of Canterbury in 1988, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Rutgers University in 1989. Delph has served on the faculty at Indiana University Bloomington, contributing to the Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior graduate program, and leading the Delph Lab, which investigates evolutionary processes from adaptation to speciation.

Her research focuses on evolutionarily based questions concerning flowering plant reproduction from ecological and genetic perspectives, including selective forces in natural populations, genetic constraints on adaptation, and speciation through reproductive isolation. Current studies center on the dioecious plant Silene latifolia, exploring sex-specific selection driving sexual dimorphism and sex-chromosome evolution, using approaches such as artificial selection, quantitative-genetic designs, experimental field arrays, QTL analysis, and pool-seq. Past research encompasses the evolution of unisexuality versus hermaphroditism, sexual dimorphism amid genetic correlations, pollen competition, flower size and fitness effects, inbreeding depression, and gynodioecy in various species. Delph has earned prestigious awards, including Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2022), Fulbright Specialist Grant (2016), Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2010), Guggenheim Fellowship (2005), Trustees’ Teaching Award (2005), Teaching Excellence Recognition Award (2000), and Outstanding Junior Faculty Award (1994-95). She served as President of the Society for the Study of Evolution in 2021. Her influential publications appear in journals such as Evolution, The American Naturalist, Current Biology, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, including "On the importance of balancing selection in plants" (New Phytologist, 2014), "Sexual dimorphism in life history" (in Gender and Sexual Dimorphism in Flowering Plants, 1999, which she co-edited), and "Haldane's Rule: Genetic Bases and Their Empirical Support" (Journal of Heredity, 2016).