Joan Roughgarden (born Jonathan David Roughgarden, 13 March 1946) is an American ecologist and evolutionary biologist. She has engaged in theory and observation of coevolution and competition in Anolis lizards of the Caribbean, and recruitment limitation in the rocky intertidal zones of California and Oregon. She has more recently become known for her rejection of sexual selection and her theistic evolutionism. Personal life and education Roughgarden was born in Paterson, New Jersey, United States. She received a Bachelor of Science in biology (with Distinction and Phi Beta Kappa) and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy with highest honors from University of Rochester in 1968 and later a Ph.D. in biology from Harvard University in 1971. In 1998, Roughgarden came out as transgender and changed her name to Joan, making a coming out post on her website on her 52nd birthday. Career Roughgarden worked as an instructor and Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of Massachusetts Boston from 1970 to 1972. In 1972 she joined the faculty of the Department of Biology at Stanford University. After becoming full professor she retired in 2011, and became Emeritus Professor. She founded and directed the Earth Systems Program at Stanford and has received awards for service to undergraduate education. In 2012 she moved to Hawaii, where she became an adjunct professor at the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology. In her academic career, Roughgarden advised 20 Ph.D. students and 15 postdoctoral fellows. Roughgarden has authored books and over 180 scientific articles. In addition to a textbook on ecological and evolutionary theory in 1979, Roughgarden has carried out ecological field studies with Caribbean lizards and with barnacles and their larvae along the California coast. In 2015, she wrote the fiction novel Ram-2050, a science-fiction retelling of the Ramayana. Research Caribbean Anoles & Interspecific Competition Roughgarden's early work in the 1970s and 80s helped to develop the Anolis lizards of the Caribbean as an important model system for evolution and ecology. For example, she used she two-species enclosure experiments on two Caribbean islands to demonstrate increasing strength of interspecific competition as resource partitioning decreases: a central tenet for competition theory. The Anolis system thus provided an early example of an eco-evolutionary feedback, and with further development by Jonathan Losos and others, has become an important example of adaptive radiation. Barnacles & Recruitment Limitation After setting up a lab at the Hopkins Marine Station, Roughgarden sought to