Rebecca Panko is a Post Doctoral Research Associate in the Josephs Lab at the Department of Plant Biology at Michigan State University. She is broadly interested in urban evolution and ecology, and studies plant evolution in urban environments. In her post doc work, she aims to quantify the relative contributions phenotypic plasticity, local adaptation, and epigenetics in shaping urban populations of the cosmopolitan weed, shepherd's purse (Capsella bursa-pastoris). She received her PhD at the Federated Department of Biological Sciences at Rutgers University - Newark and the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where she was advised by Daniel E. Bunker. Her dissertation work examined local adaptation of shepherd's purse in the New York Metropolitan area.