Rate My Professor kathryn hodgins

Associate Professor Kathryn Hodgins is an ecological genomicist in the School of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science, at Monash University, where she serves as Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Director and Head of the Plant Ecological Genomics Research Group. She majored in biology and anthropology at the University of Toronto and completed her PhD there studying the evolution of plant reproductive systems. In 2008, she undertook a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia with Loren Rieseberg and Sally Otto, investigating evolution in invasive plants. In 2011, she became a Research Associate and bioinformatician on the AdapTree project, examining the genetic basis of local adaptation to climate in conifers. She joined Monash University as a Lecturer in January 2014 and has progressed to Associate Professor. Her research focuses on plant evolution in human-altered environments, using weedy and invasive plants to uncover the genetic basis of rapid evolutionary change. Key areas include adaptation to climate change, crop evolution, evolution of plant sexual systems, and local adaptation in wide-ranging species across diverse climates. She employs genomic and experimental approaches to identify genes underlying adaptive differences and to understand constraints on adaptation, with applications in managing herbicide resistance and climate resilience.

Hodgins has secured multiple Australian Research Council Discovery Project grants as Primary Chief Investigator, including projects on the genetics of rapid adaptation to climate change, climate-resilient grassland restoration, and predicting adaptation under climate change. She has supervised seven higher degree by research completions in five years, with students publishing in top journals and winning awards. In 2025, she received the Faculty of Science Researcher of the Year Award for her pioneering work on structural variants and climate adaptation in invasive plants, highlighted by first- and senior-author papers in Science, PNAS, and Nature Ecology & Evolution, and the Award for Excellence in Postgraduate Research Supervision. Notable publications include 'Convergent local adaptation to climate in distantly related conifers' (Science, 2016), 'Global urban environmental change drives adaptation in white clover' (Science, 2022), 'Rapid and repeated local adaptation to climate in an invasive plant' (New Phytologist, 2019), and 'Haploblocks contribute to parallel climate adaptation following global invasion of a cosmopolitan plant' (Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2025). Her work, with over 3300 citations, advances understanding of invasion genomics, climate adaptation, and evolutionary biology.