Cassandra Elphinstone

Academic interests

Cassandra studies the genomes of Arctic and alpine plants to better understand their responses to climate change. She combines population genetics, reference genomes, gene expression and DNA methylation data with field ecological measurements to determine the molecular basis of climate changes responses. 

Cassandra loves bioinformatics and enjoys building open source tools to help us better understand genomes (e.g. RepeatOBserver). 

Background

Currently, Cassandra is a postdoctoral fellow funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada working in Oslo, Norway with Siri Birkeland. 

Over the last decade, Cassandra has spent six summers conducting fieldwork on Ellesmere Island (79°N) and three summers in British Columbia’s Coastal Mountains in Canada, studying tundra plant responses to changing environmental conditions. Her PhD studied how Arctic plants are responding to climate change through migration (population genetics), evolutionary adaptation (genome evolution), and plasticity (gene expression and DNA methylation). 

Cassandra is part of the International Tundra Experiment’s steering committee, an International group of researchers looking at Arctic and alpine plants' phenotypic responses to climate change. She is also the chair of the Arctic plant section of the Canadian Biogenomes Project.