Micah Freedman
Assistant Professor, Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Micah Freedman is an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. He completed his PhD in population biology at UC Davis, where he was advised by Santiago Ramírez and Sharon Strauss. His dissertation research focused on contemporary range expansion in monarch butterflies, with a focus on the ecology and evolution of recently established populations in locations such as remote Pacific Islands.
After completing his PhD, Freedman was a National Science Foundation postdoctoral research fellow in biology in the Kronforst Lab at the University of Chicago, where he studied the evolution of toxin sequestration in monarch butterflies. He was then a postdoctoral fellow affiliated with the Angert Lab at the University of British Columbia, where his research addressed the relationship between dispersal ability and geographic range size in milkweed plants. Previously, he studied entomology at Cornell University and worked for The Ecology of Bird Loss Project in Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. His research has been supported through funding sources that include NSERC, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society and the Society for the Study of Evolution.
At U of T, Freedman's research program centres primarily around plant-insect interactions, with a particular emphasis on monarch butterflies and their milkweed host plants. General areas of interest include the evolution of host specialization in plant-herbivore interactions, the biology of species that sequester toxins from their diets, animal migration, and the evolution of phenotypic plasticity. His current NSERC Discovery Grant focuses on how environmental change — especially habitat modification and climate warming — influences monarch butterfly ecology. For this research, Freedman’s group is studying environmental cues that coordinate migration timing, the role of alternative migration strategies for adaptation and patterns of host plant usage across space and time.