Noah K. Whiteman, Ph.D.
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Noah Whiteman on the University of California, Berkeley campus in 2016, near Strawberry Creek
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Appointments and Education
- Principal Investigator, Center for Computational Biology, University of California, Berkeley, 2016-present
- Affilated Faculty, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California, Berkeley, 2016-present
- Curator, Plant-Animal Coevolution, Jepson & University Herbaria, Univiersity of California, Berkeley, September 2016-present
- Associate Professor with tenure: Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, January 2016-present
- Principal Investigator, Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, 2010-present
- Assistant Professor (12/2010-2015) and Associate Professor with tenure (2015): Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona; Joint/Courtesy Appointments in Department of Neuroscience, Department of Entomology, and School of Plant Sciences, University of Arizona, 2012-2015; Member, Center for Insect Science, University of Arizona, 2010-2015; Graduate Interdisciplinary Programs: Entomology and Insect Science, and Genetics, 2010-2015
- NIH NRSA Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Department of Molecular Biology, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, 2007-2010
- Postdoctoral Fellow and Head Teaching Fellow, Animal Behavior course (OEB 57), Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, 2006-2007
- Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Biology, University of Missouri-St. Louis, 2006
- Ph.D., Ecology, Evolution and Systematics, University of Missouri-St. Louis, 2006
- M.S., Entomology, University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000
- B.A., cum laude and with distinction in Biology, Saint John's University (Minnesota), 1998
Honors and Awards
- Elective Member, American Ornithologists' Union, 2012
- National Institutes of Health, Kirschstein National Research Service Award for Individual Postdoctoral Fellows, 2007-2010
- Harvard University Distinction in Teaching Award, 2007
- Most Innovative Research (poster session), Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Disease Meeting, Pennsylvania State University, 2006
- Island Press Award, Student Competition Oral Presentations, Conservation Genetics, Society for Conservation Biology, Columbia University, 2004
- NSF Doctoral Dissertation Enhancement Grant, 2003
Research Interests
Molecular, genomic, organismal and evolutionary basis of adaptations arising from species interactions (e.g., co-evolution), rooted in natural history.
Background
I was born in southern California, near Huntington Beach, and then when I was two years old, my family moved to Duluth, Minnesota, on the western tip of beautiful Lake Superior. My father, a superb naturalist and outdoorsman, taught me much of what I know about the natural world. When I was 11 years old, we moved from Duluth into the wilds of northeastern Minnesota, deep in the Sax Zim Bog, not far from the tiny towns of Toivola and Meadowlands, close to where Bob Dylan was raised. There, I attended a K-12 public school of around 150 students. I was both class president (there were only 15 of us) and I was bullied. My parents sold furniture at a local store and were very supportive of my desire to obtain a college degree and, eventually, graduate degrees. I worked on a dairy farm stacking hay bales and in furniture factory. Despite few electives, only a nine-man football team, no running track and an hour-long bus ride to school, the boreal forest was a magical place in which to find myself. We hunted white-tailed deer (I shot a large doe with a bow and arrow, field-dressed it and tanned the hide when I was 14 years old!) and ruffed grouse. This landscape is a result of the retreat of the last glacial ice sheet, and it now resembles the taiga, with stunted black spruces and tamaracks as far as the eye can see. The aurora borealis, great grey owls, timberwolves, and pitcher plants are the things that come to my mind when I think back on this time. This experience, which included a lot of time in solitude, instilled in me a love for the natural world that has fueled my desire to understand how it works. Relatively untouched habitats are hard to find, and sometimes they are dangerous, but these are the places where one can still study evolution in action, and to these places I am drawn. In more recent years, I have also become interested in studying local species, including those in my dog park.
My undergraduate research project was on character displacement in social wasps (with Jim Poff at St. John's University in the oak savanna and northern tallgrass prairie of central Minnesota). My family moved to Nevada while I was in college and I fell in love with the Mojave Desert and Sky Islands of the Spring Mountains. I then went on to do a M.S. degree in systematic entomology at the University of Missouri-Columbia with Bob Sites where I was trained as an entomologist and studied host-parasite interactions, water beetle morphology, taxonomy and aquatic insect biology. I stayed in Missouri for my Ph.D. training and worked on population genetics and disease ecology of host-parasite interactions in the Galápagos with Patty Parker at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and in collaboration with the Saint Louis Zoo. This included months-long stints living in a tent on the beaches of the Galápagos Islands working with endangered birds and their parasites, most of which accompanied the immediate evolutionary ancestors of the birds to the archipelago. I banded hundreds of Galápagos hawks (Buteo galapagoensis) and Swainson's hawks (B. swainsoni) as part of this work, in Ecuador, Argentina and New Mexico. In 2006 I left Missouri for Harvard University where I completed an NIH NRSA postdoctoral fellowship with Naomi Pierce and Fred Ausubel on genomics of plant-insect interactions.
I am a biologist because I am a naturalist - I love nature and am inspired by the beauty and complexity of life on Earth. Science has given me a great way of understanding the world, and many day-to-day challenges in which we all find ourselves. Cultivation of a rational mind is a virtuous endeavor greatly facilitated by scientific training. I see myself and my training through the lens of what Professor Doug Futuyma (Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, SUNY Stony Brook) called, a "scientific naturalist" perspective in his eloquent address to the American Society of Naturalists [Futuyma, D.J. (1998) Wherefore and Whither the Naturalist. Am. Nat. 151, 1-6]: "I think of a scientific naturalist as a person with a deep and broad familiarity with one or more groups of organisms or ecological communities, who can draw on her knowledge of systematics, distribution, life histories, behavior, and perhaps physiology and morphology to inspire ideas, to evaluate hypotheses, to intelligently design research with an awareness of organisms' special peculiarities. Even more, perhaps, he is the person who is inexhaustibly fascinated by biological diversity, and who does not view organisms merely as models, or vehicles for theory but, rather, as the raison d'etre for biological investigation, as the Ding an sich, the thing in itself, that excites our admiration and our desire for knowledge, understanding, and preservation."
"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety..." (Act II, Antony and Cleopatra)
I am thrilled to be on the faculty in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California. Because of my personal history, I am interested in encouraging those from all backgrounds to join and enrich the scientific enterprise with their perspectives--this includes, of course, those with liberal and conservative political perspectives, those who hold religious views and those who do not, those from big cities or those from rural areas. I am a first-generation college student. I was the first openly gay faculty member in my department at the University of Arizona and I am also the first in my new department at the University of California, Berkeley. I have found academia to be an oasis: at each university where I have worked I came to believe that I belonged there. I look forward to the day when none of us is judged by non-merit based criteria, where none of us has to talk about rising above societal perceptions of income, ethnicity, religion, physical traits, accents, sexual orientation or gender, political opinions and where human diversity is embraced in all of its forms, at all levels in our society and in every place. Until that day comes, we need to talk about it. To those of you, especially from the LGBT community, or those growing up in rural areas, or inner cities, who might doubt that there could be a place for you at the table of science, I am here to tell you that there *is* a place for you, but you will need support from others, determination, a strong locus of self-confidence, ambition and a sense of humor.
My undergraduate research project was on character displacement in social wasps (with Jim Poff at St. John's University in the oak savanna and northern tallgrass prairie of central Minnesota). My family moved to Nevada while I was in college and I fell in love with the Mojave Desert and Sky Islands of the Spring Mountains. I then went on to do a M.S. degree in systematic entomology at the University of Missouri-Columbia with Bob Sites where I was trained as an entomologist and studied host-parasite interactions, water beetle morphology, taxonomy and aquatic insect biology. I stayed in Missouri for my Ph.D. training and worked on population genetics and disease ecology of host-parasite interactions in the Galápagos with Patty Parker at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and in collaboration with the Saint Louis Zoo. This included months-long stints living in a tent on the beaches of the Galápagos Islands working with endangered birds and their parasites, most of which accompanied the immediate evolutionary ancestors of the birds to the archipelago. I banded hundreds of Galápagos hawks (Buteo galapagoensis) and Swainson's hawks (B. swainsoni) as part of this work, in Ecuador, Argentina and New Mexico. In 2006 I left Missouri for Harvard University where I completed an NIH NRSA postdoctoral fellowship with Naomi Pierce and Fred Ausubel on genomics of plant-insect interactions.
I am a biologist because I am a naturalist - I love nature and am inspired by the beauty and complexity of life on Earth. Science has given me a great way of understanding the world, and many day-to-day challenges in which we all find ourselves. Cultivation of a rational mind is a virtuous endeavor greatly facilitated by scientific training. I see myself and my training through the lens of what Professor Doug Futuyma (Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, SUNY Stony Brook) called, a "scientific naturalist" perspective in his eloquent address to the American Society of Naturalists [Futuyma, D.J. (1998) Wherefore and Whither the Naturalist. Am. Nat. 151, 1-6]: "I think of a scientific naturalist as a person with a deep and broad familiarity with one or more groups of organisms or ecological communities, who can draw on her knowledge of systematics, distribution, life histories, behavior, and perhaps physiology and morphology to inspire ideas, to evaluate hypotheses, to intelligently design research with an awareness of organisms' special peculiarities. Even more, perhaps, he is the person who is inexhaustibly fascinated by biological diversity, and who does not view organisms merely as models, or vehicles for theory but, rather, as the raison d'etre for biological investigation, as the Ding an sich, the thing in itself, that excites our admiration and our desire for knowledge, understanding, and preservation."
"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety..." (Act II, Antony and Cleopatra)
I am thrilled to be on the faculty in the Department of Integrative Biology at the University of California. Because of my personal history, I am interested in encouraging those from all backgrounds to join and enrich the scientific enterprise with their perspectives--this includes, of course, those with liberal and conservative political perspectives, those who hold religious views and those who do not, those from big cities or those from rural areas. I am a first-generation college student. I was the first openly gay faculty member in my department at the University of Arizona and I am also the first in my new department at the University of California, Berkeley. I have found academia to be an oasis: at each university where I have worked I came to believe that I belonged there. I look forward to the day when none of us is judged by non-merit based criteria, where none of us has to talk about rising above societal perceptions of income, ethnicity, religion, physical traits, accents, sexual orientation or gender, political opinions and where human diversity is embraced in all of its forms, at all levels in our society and in every place. Until that day comes, we need to talk about it. To those of you, especially from the LGBT community, or those growing up in rural areas, or inner cities, who might doubt that there could be a place for you at the table of science, I am here to tell you that there *is* a place for you, but you will need support from others, determination, a strong locus of self-confidence, ambition and a sense of humor.