Ruan van Mazijk
He/Him
I’m gay and I’m an ecologist, evolutionary biologist, and botanist. //
I’m currently a master’s student at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, where I’m working on the links between plant ecophysiology and genome size. I also tutor and assist in teaching in a data analysis course, taught primarily with R. I truly am obsessed with plants big and small, and have a soft spot for urban cosmopolitan weeds and mosses. I’ve always wanted to be a scientist, and have always loved nature and been fascinated by plants. I also love programming, mathematics, and statistics, so I enjoy using computationally strong methods. In my work, I’m looking at how water-use efficiency and growth with respect to rainfall season relates to species’ genome sizes. The idea is that larger-genomed species, which have proportionally large cells, may differ in ecology and physiology to their relatives with smaller genomes.