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
- Associate Professor, Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, 2016-present
- Affiliated Faculty, Essig Museum of Entomology, University of California, Berkeley, 2019-present
- Affiliated Faculty, Center for Computational Biology, University of California, Berkeley, 2016-present
- Affiliated Faculty, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California, Berkeley, 2016-present
- Affiliated Faculty, Jepson & University Herbaria, University of California, Berkeley, 2016-present
- Principal Investigator, Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, 2009-present
- Assistant Professor (12/2010-3/2015) and Associate Professor with tenure (4/2015-1/2016): Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona; Joint 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
- John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 2020
- Elected Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society 2020-
- Elected Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, 2020-
- Elected Member, Sigma Xi, 2020-
- 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), toxins and resistance mechanisms, rooted in natural history.
Background
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 (and a liberal arts education) 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, Black and African American folks, Latinx folks, BIPOC folks, immigrants, those with liberal and conservative political perspectives, LGBTQIA+ folks, 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--my maternal great-grandparents were all immigrants who escaped dire conditions in their birthplaces to seek new opportunities here.
I was the first out LGBTQIA+ tenured faculty member in my department at the University of Arizona and the same is true now at the University of California, Berkeley. Although I carry a lot of privilege as a white cis gay man, I have found academia to largely be an oasis: at each university where I have worked I came to believe that I belonged there--but I know others who have had terrible experiences. 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 negative societal perceptions of skin color, income, ethnicity, religion, accents, sexual orientation or gender identity, 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 the issues minoritized people face as they move through their careers, and do something about it. To those of you 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.
I was born in southern California, near Huntington Beach, and when I was two years old, my family moved to Duluth, Minnesota (where my parents were from), 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--and died too soon, from alcoholism. 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 near the open pit iron ore mines that produced the steel that allowed the Allies to beat back the Axis powers in World War II. 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. We moved there because my dad was selling used cars at a dealership in Duluth and he had the opportunity to help manage a furniture store that was "centrally located" between Duluth and the Iron Range. My parents both ended up working at this store. Although they had not had the opportunity to go to go to college, they were very supportive of my desire to obtain a college degree. I worked on a Holstein dairy farm stacking hay at age 12, a tough job, except the farmers were incredibly nice and gentle people and I got to look up at the barn swallows building nests in the eves of the barn between stacking the bales. I also worked in a furniture factory in high school, first as a janitor and then as a sander, running a pneumatic disk sander over the arms of red and white oak dining room chairs. It was interesting because there were no red or white oak up in our forests but I wondered about where these oaks grew--I knew that these trees grew in the central part of the state...
The winters were long, there were few electives, only a nine-man football team, no running track and getting to school required an hour long bus ride (or on one's snowmobile), the boreal forest was a magical place in which to find myself and my passion. I remember gazing at the aurora borealis and hearing timberwolves howling in dark winter nights (sometimes minus 40, where F and C are actually the same temperature) and in the summers, an aerial river of common nighthawks would continue for days, as they migrated each year to destinations unknown. I took all of this for granted. My father taught us to hunt white-tailed deer (I shot a doe with a bow and arrow, field-dressed it and tanned the hide when I was 14 years old!) and ruffed grouse. I had mixed feelings about it all. But, I remember finding liver flukes in the deer, and finding feather lice on the ruffed grouse and these host-parasite interactions fascinated me--a memory rekindled in the Galápagos Islands 11 years later when I "dust-ruffled" lice off of those amazing Galapagos hawks for my dissertation work.
The landscape in this part of northern Minnesota 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. Little did I know my backyard (Sax-Zim) was already a famous birding site. The 'Arctic Riviera' as it is now known, attracted birds (and other animals) that normally lived in the high latitudes, with its boreal flora and fauna--busloads of tourists would arrive near our house each summer and winter. I remember asking them, "Why are you here?" They would say, "To watch birds!" I was puzzled. To me, it was just the neighborhood. I distinctly remember a great grey owl that would sit on the electrical pole behind our house while I did the dishes most winter evenings--I felt like we knew one another.
For my first job 'away' from home, at 17, I applied for a Naturalist position at Gunflint Lodge, an hour north of Grand Marais on the Gunflint Trail on the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and just across the lake from Ontario. It was a fancy lodge catering to professionals from the Twin Cities and Chicago. It took some chutzbah to apply for this position--an example of how naiveté has served me well. But, of course one has to view these things through the privilege I carry. These experiences, 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 rather easily study evolution in action, and to these places I am drawn. In more recent years, though, 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 classically trained as an entomologist and studied host-parasite interactions and water beetle-aquatic plant interactions. 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 Professor 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 live-captured and banded hundreds of Galápagos hawks (Buteo galapagoensis) and Swainson's hawks (B. swainsoni) as part of this work, in Ecuador, Argentina and New Mexico. Professors Bob Ricklefs, Bob Marquis, Toby Kellogg and Kevin Johnson were on my dissertation committee and they taught me a lot about what it means to do good science. 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 and this too changed my life. I then started at the University of Arizona as a faculty member, and after six years moved to UC-Berkeley, where I run my research group, teach, and serve the university.
"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, Black and African American folks, Latinx folks, BIPOC folks, immigrants, those with liberal and conservative political perspectives, LGBTQIA+ folks, 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--my maternal great-grandparents were all immigrants who escaped dire conditions in their birthplaces to seek new opportunities here.
I was the first out LGBTQIA+ tenured faculty member in my department at the University of Arizona and the same is true now at the University of California, Berkeley. Although I carry a lot of privilege as a white cis gay man, I have found academia to largely be an oasis: at each university where I have worked I came to believe that I belonged there--but I know others who have had terrible experiences. 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 negative societal perceptions of skin color, income, ethnicity, religion, accents, sexual orientation or gender identity, 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 the issues minoritized people face as they move through their careers, and do something about it. To those of you 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.
I was born in southern California, near Huntington Beach, and when I was two years old, my family moved to Duluth, Minnesota (where my parents were from), 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--and died too soon, from alcoholism. 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 near the open pit iron ore mines that produced the steel that allowed the Allies to beat back the Axis powers in World War II. 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. We moved there because my dad was selling used cars at a dealership in Duluth and he had the opportunity to help manage a furniture store that was "centrally located" between Duluth and the Iron Range. My parents both ended up working at this store. Although they had not had the opportunity to go to go to college, they were very supportive of my desire to obtain a college degree. I worked on a Holstein dairy farm stacking hay at age 12, a tough job, except the farmers were incredibly nice and gentle people and I got to look up at the barn swallows building nests in the eves of the barn between stacking the bales. I also worked in a furniture factory in high school, first as a janitor and then as a sander, running a pneumatic disk sander over the arms of red and white oak dining room chairs. It was interesting because there were no red or white oak up in our forests but I wondered about where these oaks grew--I knew that these trees grew in the central part of the state...
The winters were long, there were few electives, only a nine-man football team, no running track and getting to school required an hour long bus ride (or on one's snowmobile), the boreal forest was a magical place in which to find myself and my passion. I remember gazing at the aurora borealis and hearing timberwolves howling in dark winter nights (sometimes minus 40, where F and C are actually the same temperature) and in the summers, an aerial river of common nighthawks would continue for days, as they migrated each year to destinations unknown. I took all of this for granted. My father taught us to hunt white-tailed deer (I shot a doe with a bow and arrow, field-dressed it and tanned the hide when I was 14 years old!) and ruffed grouse. I had mixed feelings about it all. But, I remember finding liver flukes in the deer, and finding feather lice on the ruffed grouse and these host-parasite interactions fascinated me--a memory rekindled in the Galápagos Islands 11 years later when I "dust-ruffled" lice off of those amazing Galapagos hawks for my dissertation work.
The landscape in this part of northern Minnesota 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. Little did I know my backyard (Sax-Zim) was already a famous birding site. The 'Arctic Riviera' as it is now known, attracted birds (and other animals) that normally lived in the high latitudes, with its boreal flora and fauna--busloads of tourists would arrive near our house each summer and winter. I remember asking them, "Why are you here?" They would say, "To watch birds!" I was puzzled. To me, it was just the neighborhood. I distinctly remember a great grey owl that would sit on the electrical pole behind our house while I did the dishes most winter evenings--I felt like we knew one another.
For my first job 'away' from home, at 17, I applied for a Naturalist position at Gunflint Lodge, an hour north of Grand Marais on the Gunflint Trail on the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and just across the lake from Ontario. It was a fancy lodge catering to professionals from the Twin Cities and Chicago. It took some chutzbah to apply for this position--an example of how naiveté has served me well. But, of course one has to view these things through the privilege I carry. These experiences, 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 rather easily study evolution in action, and to these places I am drawn. In more recent years, though, 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 classically trained as an entomologist and studied host-parasite interactions and water beetle-aquatic plant interactions. 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 Professor 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 live-captured and banded hundreds of Galápagos hawks (Buteo galapagoensis) and Swainson's hawks (B. swainsoni) as part of this work, in Ecuador, Argentina and New Mexico. Professors Bob Ricklefs, Bob Marquis, Toby Kellogg and Kevin Johnson were on my dissertation committee and they taught me a lot about what it means to do good science. 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 and this too changed my life. I then started at the University of Arizona as a faculty member, and after six years moved to UC-Berkeley, where I run my research group, teach, and serve the university.