Dr Ulrike Bauer

About me:

I am a tropical ecologist by training, and I am fascinated by form-function relationships in nature. My interdisciplinary Mechanical Ecology Lab broadly studies how plants adapt their surfaces and material properties to cope with physical challenges in their environment or exploit physical principles to their advantage. We strive to understand the mechanisms underlying the specialized function of plant surfaces and materials, the processes and regulators underlying their development, and ultimately, elucidate how mechanical factors shape plant ecology and evolution.

My Mechanical Ecology Lab tries to understand how plants adapt their surfaces and material properties to cope with physical challenges in their environment or exploit physical principles to their advantage, and how we can apply this understanding to future-proofing our crops, mitigating the effects of global change, and developing innovative biomimetic technologies. Using carnivorous Nepenthes pitcher plants as a model, we investigate wetting and directional water transport on micropatterned leaf surfaces, as well as the developmental processes and genetic regulators underpinning the formation of such unusual epidermis patterns. Other projects aim to identify key adaptations that enable plants to withstand high wind forces and impacts from hail or heavy rain. We also study how carnivorous plants make viscoelastic and sticky secretions, how these secretions impede insect movement, and how they interact with other secreted compounds such as enzymes. Together with evolutionary biologists and bioinformaticians, we mine genomes of carnivorous plants for convergently evolved traits that have the potential to confer benefits for pest resistance or enhanced growth, with the long-term aim to transfer them to non-carnivorous model and crop plants.

2006 – 2010 PhD in Zoology, Trinity College, University of Cambridge, UK

2000 – 2006 Diploma of Biology, University of Würzburg, Germany

2010 – 2013 Junior Research Fellow in Plant Sciences, Robinson College, University of Cambridge, UK

2014 – 2016 Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Biological Sciences, University of Bristol, UK

2017 – 2023 Royal Society University Research Fellow, Biological Sciences, University of Bristol, UK

2023 – present Royal Society University Research Fellow, Biosciences, University of Exeter, UK