Lily D. Peck

Hello!

I am an evolutionary biologist at the Dept. of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California Los Angeles, working with Victoria Sork. I received my PhD in Evolutionary Biology from Imperial College London, supervised by Tim Barraclough and Matthew Ryan at the Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences (CABI).

My research addresses questions in evolutionary genomics. Specifically, I study the genetic mechanisms by which organisms adapt to environmental change, such as a warming climate, disease, or anthropogenic-induced landscape changes. In my free time I like to be in nature, swimming and surfing in the Pacific ocean and running in the coastal hills.

news

Jul 30, 2025	Went to Botany 2025 in Palm Springs with the other members of the Sork lab, where we all either presented a poster or gave a talk 🙌🏼. Was inspired by some amazing work ranging from carbon transport in leaves to pangenomes, and gave two talks myself, one about the ecophysiological response to wildfire in mature oak trees, and the other about changes to the DNA methylome following drought stress in oak seedlings!
Sep 10, 2024	Invited to give a departmental seminar in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology here at UCLA. The title of my talk was “Can DNA methylation help us understand climate-adaptation in trees?”
Jul 28, 2024	Talk at the 3rd Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology meeting in Montréal in the Adaptive Epigenetics session! It was great meeting and collaborating with the organisers and other speakers in the session - watch this space!

selected publications

Horizontal transfers between fungal Fusarium species contributed to successive outbreaks of coffee wilt disease

Lily D. Peck, Theo Llewellyn, Bastien Bennetot, and 9 more authors

PLOS Biology, Dec 2024

Abs DOI
Can DNA methylation shape climate response in trees?

Lily D. Peck, and Victoria L. Sork

Trends in Plant Science, Jun 2024

DOI
Coffee wilt disease: The forgotten threat to coffee

Lily D. Peck, and Eric Boa

Plant Pathology, Apr 2024

Abs DOI

Abstract Coffee is attacked by several highly damaging pests and diseases, which include coffee wilt disease (CWD). Despite a devastating impact in recent years, CWD receives little attention and its importance is downplayed or simply ignored. Memories are short and knowledge of past outbreaks fragmentary. Nearly two decades after the last major outbreaks, CWD has quietly faded into the background. This review describes a series of outbreaks of CWD across Africa, from Uganda to Guinea, from the first discovery in the 1920s to a hugely damaging recurrence that began in the 1970s and lasted through to the 2000s. This second wave had devastating impacts on growers and communities in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Uganda. This review examines the origins of the disease, how and why it spread, and attempts to manage the outbreaks. Recent work on new pathogen variants is also considered. This review aims to recount these events and to evaluate the strategic successes and failures at national, regional and international levels in tackling the second wave of CWD.