Karl Joseph Niklas (born August 23, 1948), is the Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor Emeritus at Cornell University.[1] His work integrates the physical sciences and mathematics with biology to study form, function, and evolution. Niklas has authored over 500 peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, reviews, and six books, integrating biomechanics, scaling theory, and evolutionary biology.[2][3]
Niklas was the Curator of Paleobotany at the New York Botanical Garden (1974–1978), while having an adjunct faculty appointment at Lehman College, CUNY.[6] In 1978, Niklas joined the faculty at Cornell University as an assistant professor (1978), becoming a full professor of botany (1985).[7] In 2000, he was appointed as a Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor and held the position until his retirement in 2019. He was an Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand (2004), a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2013), and a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell (2012).[8][9]
Research
Niklas's work in biomechanics examines how physical forces such as wind and gravity shape plant form, stability, and growth.[10]
His book Plant Biomechanics: An Engineering Approach to Plant Form and Function (1992) applied engineering principles to plant biology and helped establish biomechanics as a distinct field of plant science.[11] In Plant Allometry: The Scaling of Form and Process (1994), he advanced quantitative models describing scaling relationships among biomass, organ size, and environmental factors.[12]
Niklas has also made significant contributions to evolutionary paleobotany by developing computational models of early land plant morphospaces simulated design spaces that linked fossil diversity patterns with fluid mechanics, structural stability, and reproductive strategies. His quantitative analysis of the plant fossil record provided methods to reconstruct diversification and extinction dynamics throughout the Phanerozoic.[13]
In recent decades, Niklas has explored the interface of biophysics and evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), modeling the developmental origins of complex multicellularity and investigating how genetic and physical processes interact to shape plant form.[14]
↑ Niklas, Karl J. (1992). Plant biomechanics: an engineering approach to plant form and function. Chicago, Ill.: Univ. of Chicago Press. ISBN978-0-226-58631-1.
↑ Klinkhamer, Peter G. L. (March 1995). "Plant allometry: The scaling of form and process: by Karl J. Niklas University of Chicago Press, 1994". Trends in Ecology & Evolution. 10 (3): 134. doi:10.1016/S0169-5347(00)89015-1.
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