About

Chang Tan is an Associate Professor of Art History and Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She holds a B.A. in Economics and Chinese Literature/Language from Peking University, as well as an M.A. and Ph.D. in comparative literature and contemporary art history from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research specializes in Chinese, East Asian, and Asian diasporic art of the 20th and 21st centuries, with particular interests in global avant-gardism, public and socially engaged art, eco art and activism, vernacular artmaking, and the history of collecting and exhibiting Asian art. Dr. Tan authored the monograph 'The Minjian Avant-garde: Art of the Crowd in Contemporary China' (Cornell, 2023), which examines how experimental artists in post-Mao China interacted with the volatile and diverse public, and critically assesses the rise of populism in art and politics. Her ongoing projects include a book titled 'Network Moderns,' exploring the intersection of photography, painting, design, and theater in China and the Chinese diaspora from the 19th century to the present, emphasizing collaborative and vernacular aspects of modernisms. She is also working on a collaborative project on Sinophone eco art. Her scholarly activities include publishing in peer-reviewed journals, curatorial and editorial work exploring Asian and Asian American art through the concept of Global Asias, and serving on editorial boards. Dr. Tan's teaching spans graduate to freshman seminars in Art History and Asian Studies.

Research topics

• Botany
• Biology
• Ecology
• Biochemistry

Selected publications

• FAD-dependent hexenal isomerases in Lepidoptera evolved convergently with plant-derived hexenal isomerases

  Research Square · 2025-08-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Author response for "Low water availability enhances volatile‐mediated direct defenses but disturbs indirect defenses against herbivores"

  2022-05-21

  peer-review
  PublisherDOI

• Low water availability enhances volatile‐mediated direct defences but disturbs indirect defences against herbivores

  Journal of Ecology · 2022 · 20 citations

  • Biology
  • Botany
  • Ecology

  Abstract Interactions between plants and natural enemies of insect herbivores influence plant productivity and survival by reducing herbivory. Plants attract natural enemies via herbivore‐induced plant volatiles (HIPVs), but how water availability (WA) influences HIPV‐mediated defences is unclear. We use tomato, Solanum lycopersicum , tomato fruitworm, Helicoverpa zea and two natural enemies, the parasitoid wasp, Microplitis croceipes and the predator spined soldier bug, Podisus maculiventris , to investigate the effect of WA on HIPV emission dynamics and associated plant defence. We show that low WA initially increases total HIPV emission by tomato on the first day of herbivore exposure and, in contrast, reduces HIPV emission on the second day. Low WA enhances HIPVs that are mostly found in tomato trichomes. Notably, some volatiles inhibited by low WA are known attractants of natural enemies. Evidence from Y‐tube and in‐cage behavioural assays indicates that changes in HIPV emissions by low WA compromise the ability of tomato plants to attract natural enemies. Synthesis . Based on our results, we propose a hypothesis where plants respond to low WA by enhancing repellent HIPV emissions and reducing the emission of HIPVs that attract natural enemies, which disrupts natural enemy‐mediated plant indirect defences, but enhances plant direct defence against herbivores.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Silencing the alarm: an insect salivary enzyme closes plant stomata and inhibits volatile release

  New Phytologist · 2021 · 80 citations

  • Biology
  • Botany
  • Biochemistry

  Herbivore-induced plant volatiles (HIPVs) are widely recognized as an ecologically important defensive response of plants against herbivory. Although the induction of this 'cry for help' has been well documented, only a few studies have investigated the inhibition of HIPVs by herbivores and little is known about whether herbivores have evolved mechanisms to inhibit the release of HIPVs. To examine the role of herbivore effectors in modulating HIPVs and stomatal dynamics, we conducted series of experiments combining pharmacological, surgical, genetic (CRISPR-Cas9) and chemical (GC-MS analysis) approaches. We show that the salivary enzyme, glucose oxidase (GOX), secreted by the caterpillar Helicoverpa zea on leaves, causes stomatal closure in tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) within 5 min, and in both tomato and soybean (Glycine max) for at least 48 h. GOX also inhibits the emission of several HIPVs during feeding by H. zea, including (Z)-3-hexenol, (Z)-jasmone and (Z)-3-hexenyl acetate, which are important airborne signals in plant defenses. Our findings highlight a potential adaptive strategy where an insect herbivore inhibits plant airborne defenses during feeding by exploiting the association between stomatal dynamics and HIPV emission.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Fungi from the black cutworm Agrotis ipsilon oral secretions mediate plant–insect interactions

  Arthropod-Plant Interactions · 2020-04-20 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Top‐down effects from parasitoids may mediate plant defence and plant fitness

  Functional Ecology · 2020 · 14 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Biology
  • Ecology
  • Botany

  Abstract Plants face many environmental stresses that can impact their survival, development and fitness. Insects are the most diverse, abundant and threatening herbivores in nature. As a consequence, plants produce direct chemical and physical defences to reduce herbivory. They also release volatiles to recruit natural enemies that indirectly protect them from herbivory. The recruitment of parasitic wasps can benefit plant fitness because they ultimately kill their insect hosts. Recently, studies showed that parasitoids can indirectly mediate plant defences by modulating herbivore oral secretions. In addition to the direct benefits of parasitoids in terms of reducing herbivore survival, we tested if the reduction in induced defences by parasitized caterpillars compared to non‐parasitized caterpillars may reduce the costs associated with defence expression. We provide evidence that tomato plants treated with saliva from parasitized caterpillars have significantly higher fitness parameters including increased flower numbers (16.3%) and heavier fruit weight (13.5%), compared to plants treated with saliva from non‐parasitized caterpillars. Since plants were grown without actual herbivores, the higher values for these fitness parameters were due to lower costs of induced defences and not due to reduced herbivory by parasitized caterpillars. Furthermore, the resulting seed germination time was shorter and the germination rate was higher when the maternal plants were previously exposed to parasitized herbivore treatment compared to control (non‐treated) plants. Overall, application of saliva did not result in transgenerational priming of offspring defence responses. However, offspring of parents exposed to caterpillar saliva had lower constitutive levels and higher induced levels of trypsin inhibitor than offspring from unexposed parents. This study shows that the saliva of parasitized caterpillars can modulate plant defences and further demonstrates that the lower induction of plant defences is associated with elevated plant fitness in the absence of herbivore feeding, suggesting that induced plant defences are costly. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Contrasting Pollination Systems of Wild Unction and Devil's Potato Root (Apocynaceae) on San Salvador: Preliminary Observations and Analyses

  Castanea · 2019-05-28 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Parasitic Wasp Mediates Plant Perception of Insect Herbivores

  Journal of Chemical Ecology · 2019-11-11 · 20 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Symbiotic polydnavirus of a parasite manipulates caterpillar and plant immunity

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2018-04-30 · 84 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Significance The role of herbivore-associated microbes in mediating plant–herbivore interactions has gained recent attention. We show that a parasitoid associated with its caterpillar host not only suppresses the immune system of the caterpillar but also suppresses the induced defenses of the caterpillar’s host plant. Parasitoids inject eggs into their hosts but also inject polydnaviruses that suppress the caterpillar’s immunity. Immunosuppression enables eggs to hatch and develop as larvae within caterpillars. Additionally, the polydnavirus reduces salivary glucose oxidase, the primary elicitor found in the caterpillar’s oral secretions. Caterpillars injected with polydnavirus induce lower plant defenses than untreated caterpillars. Our results reveal a dimension to the complexity of plant–herbivore interactions indicating that polydnaviruses mediate the phenotypes of the parasitoid, herbivore, and plant.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The diversity and evolution of pollination systems in large plant clades: Apocynaceae as a case study

  Annals of Botany · 2018-07-14 · 104 citations

  articleOpen access

  Background and Aims: Large clades of angiosperms are often characterized by diverse interactions with pollinators, but how these pollination systems are structured phylogenetically and biogeographically is still uncertain for most families. Apocynaceae is a clade of >5300 species with a worldwide distribution. A database representing >10 % of species in the family was used to explore the diversity of pollinators and evolutionary shifts in pollination systems across major clades and regions. Methods: The database was compiled from published and unpublished reports. Plants were categorized into broad pollination systems and then subdivided to include bimodal systems. These were mapped against the five major divisions of the family, and against the smaller clades. Finally, pollination systems were mapped onto a phylogenetic reconstruction that included those species for which sequence data are available, and transition rates between pollination systems were calculated. Key Results: Most Apocynaceae are insect pollinated with few records of bird pollination. Almost three-quarters of species are pollinated by a single higher taxon (e.g. flies or moths); 7 % have bimodal pollination systems, whilst the remaining approx. 20 % are insect generalists. The less phenotypically specialized flowers of the Rauvolfioids are pollinated by a more restricted set of pollinators than are more complex flowers within the Apocynoids + Periplocoideae + Secamonoideae + Asclepiadoideae (APSA) clade. Certain combinations of bimodal pollination systems are more common than others. Some pollination systems are missing from particular regions, whilst others are over-represented. Conclusions: Within Apocynaceae, interactions with pollinators are highly structured both phylogenetically and biogeographically. Variation in transition rates between pollination systems suggest constraints on their evolution, whereas regional differences point to environmental effects such as filtering of certain pollinators from habitats. This is the most extensive analysis of its type so far attempted and gives important insights into the diversity and evolution of pollination systems in large clades.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Gary W. Felton

  Pennsylvania State University

  8 shared

• Shaw‐Yhi Hwang

  National Chung Hsing University

  7 shared

• Michelle Peiffer

  6 shared

• Suzanne Koptur

  Florida International University

  4 shared

• Gretchen M. Ionta

  Georgia College & State University

  4 shared

• Cristina Rosa

  Pennsylvania State University

  4 shared

• Tatyana Livshultz

  Drexel University

  4 shared

• Kaliova Tavou Ravuiwasa

  4 shared

Education

• PhD, Entomology

  Pennsylvania State University

• Master, Entomology

  National Chung Hsing University

  2007

Awards & honors

• Supported by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation
• Supported by the Humanities Institute
• Supported by the Center for Humanities and Information
• Supported by the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual A…