© MEGHANN CHAPMANJason Holliday earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, where he worked on sea urchins and chicken embryos in a developmental biology lab. He then headed to Stanford University as a research assistant in a cell imaging lab studying signal transduction in mammalian cells. But when it came time for grad school, Holliday was ready for a change. He was interested in ecological genetics, and he knew that trees are key species in many ecosystems. He also knew there was funding for tree research. So he decided to visit the University of British Columbia’s Sally Aitken, who studied tree evolution.
“I was just very impressed,” Aitken says of her first visit with Holliday. “He’s clearly very smart and also very personable.” Even before he officially joined Aitken’s group, Holliday was out collecting samples for a project on how spruce trees adapt to climate variation. “I threw him into the deep end, really,” Aitken recalls.
Shortly after Holliday joined the lab, the group and its collaborators landed funding from Genome Canada to expand their study of spruce genetics. Holliday looked at gene expression levels in Sitka spruce plants grown from seeds gathered from trees throughout the species’ natural range to study growth patterns and the trees’ ability to withstand freezing. “Local populations need to appropriately time these transitions, as they can’t both grow and be substantially ...
