Botanist Swensen’s research interests deal with evolutionary questions about plants: what are their ancestral relationships, how did they come to occupy various parts of the globe, how recently did they diverge, and how should they be classified to better reflect their evolutionary history?

Swensen received her bachelor’s degree from Grinnell College and her master’s and doctoral degrees in botany and plant physiology and genetics from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she began investigating the evolution of plant symbioses with nitrogen- fixing bacteria. In 1992 she became a postdoctoral fellow at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden in Claremont, California, and continued her postdoctoral work at Indiana University until 1996, when she came to Ithaca College. Her current work, funded by a $100,000 NSF grant, focuses on a horticulturally important family of plants, the begonias. Swensen is interested in the family not because of its horticultural use, but because of its global distribution pattern.