Hello! Im Mark Chapman. I did not shoot John Lennon when I was two years old, that was a different Mark Chapman!

I was born in Bedford, England in 1978. My home town was the comically named Biggleswade, a hugely exciting (!) place close to London and Cambridge.

I graduated from the University of Leicester in 2000 with a BSc in Biology and swiftly moved to Scotland for my PhD at St. Andrews University. My supervisor was Prof. Richard Abbott and I investigated some case studies of hybridization and speciation in the genus Senecio (Asteraceae).

In 2004 I crossed to 'the other side' (of the Northern Hemisphere) and began a postdoc with John Burke at Vanderbilt University, Nashville working on the domestication of sunflowers. The lab moved to the the University of Georgia in 2006.

In January 2011 I moved back to England to begin a postdoc with Dmitry Filatov at the University of Oxford working on the genetics of adaptation, and using as a model the same Senecio hybrid zone as I worked on for my PhD.

To find out what I do/did/want to do please click on the links on the left.