Professor Andrew Schnabel will present the Distinguished Research Lecture at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 9, in Room 1001, Wiekamp Hall, Indiana University South Bend.

Schnabel will take participants via a Powerpoint presentation on a journey to Kenya to learn about pollination, natural selection and acacia trees during his talk “Pollination and Paternity of the African Acacia.”

The talk is free and open to the public.

Administrators and other faculty members nominate their peers for the award. Schnabel was cited for the high quality of his research and writing.

Schnabel is an associate professor of biological sciences and has been a member of the faculty since 1995. He received his doctorate in botany from the University of Kansas and he taught at Iowa State prior to his move to IU South Bend.

He was a postdoctoral associate at the University of Georgia and a National Academy of Sciences visiting scientist at Vavilov Institute of General Genetics, Moscow, Russia.

Schnabel has received several grants for his work in plant evolution and ecology, including the National Science Foundation, Indiana Academy of Sciences, The Nature Conservancy and IU South Bend.

Acacias comprises more than 1,350 species. Most species occupy arid or semi-arid regions of the tropics and sup-tropics in Australia, Africa and Central America. Due to rain patterns, many of the Kenyan species flower simultaneously and compete for pollinators.

Schnabel and his associates use genetics markers that allow them to conduct genetic fingerprinting studies to determine the consequences of this competition for acacia reproductive success and to measure how far pollinators carry pollen between trees.