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Noah K. Whiteman, Ph.D
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Overall, our research focuses on unraveling the evolutionary histories of interacting species and the genetic basis of adaptations arising from those interactions. Ever more, we focus on how toxins are a fulcrum around which these species interactions revolve.
Although the systems we have studied are diverse, the questions are all about the evolution of species interactions. A strength of our lab is pursuing studies that bridge between model organisms and those organisms that are difficult to study but remarkable in terms of their natural history. Here are some of the systems I've studied, always in collaboration with others, starting with the first systems I worked on and ending with the most recent:
Now you can see why I like this quote from Charles Darwin (On the Origin of Species, 1859) so much (he corrected the spelling of mistletoe in later editions, but I think it is kind of funny so used the first edition here):
“How have all those exquisite adaptations of one part of the organisation to another part, and to the conditions of life, and of one distinct organic being to another, been perfected? We see these beautiful co-adaptations most plainly in the woodpecker and missletoe; and only a little less plainly in the humblest parasite which clings to the hairs of a quadruped or feathers of a bird…”
Because our work involves many different systems and levels of biological organization, I enumerate below some of our most exciting research discoveries, from the most recent to the earliest, on the evolution of species interactions. I included links to the peer-reviewed papers, which are all collaborative and the first authors are noted, although please click on the links to find all of the co-authors, whom I don't list below for the sake of brevity. I don't list findings of preprints yet because they are still in the process of being vetted by colleagues through peer review.
You will note sometimes I say that something along the lines of the "first study to..." I don't do this to be prideful or to brag, which could be one way of interpreting these statements. There is nothing magical about being the first--if we hadn't discovered it, somebody else would have (if they bothered to study these questions), that's just how science works. Moreover, it was always a team of people that made the discovery, not just me. On the other hand, being the first to discover something meaningful in biology (yes, I know, who decides what that is?), is fun, and all of us do need to explain to colleagues, funding agencies, and the public why our research is important, because we wouldn't be here if it weren't for them. Not all new discoveries will be viewed as important or salient by others, which is what really matters in science given that it is a collective human enterprise. So, I only included such a statement when I thought this might be the case. I reckoned I needed to do this because of the diverse systems we use in our lab, which are sometimes incredibly obscure, and because sometimes people have trouble pigeon-holing what we do and what we've actually discovered. Plus, discoveries often require overcoming hurdles and they require the expression of intellectual leadership and courage. So this "first" notation is meant to celebrate the chutzpah needed in every one of us researchers. Our lab mantra is to listen carefully to feedback, adjust course where needed in light of it, but don't let naysayers grind you down. Carry on and do the work you think is important and that you love.
Although the systems we have studied are diverse, the questions are all about the evolution of species interactions. A strength of our lab is pursuing studies that bridge between model organisms and those organisms that are difficult to study but remarkable in terms of their natural history. Here are some of the systems I've studied, always in collaboration with others, starting with the first systems I worked on and ending with the most recent:
- Polistes paper wasps and their parasitoids
- Water beetles and their aquatic host plants
- Feather lice and their hawk hosts
- Drosophilid flies, phyllosphere bacteria and their host plants, including mustards (Brassicaceae) such as Arabidopsis thaliana
- Desert mistletoes and their legume host plants
- The community of insects that feed on cardiac glycoside bearing plants and their predators and parasitoids
- The broad-tailed hummingbird and their nectar plants
- Horizontally transferred genes from phages to diverse insects (including drosphilid flies) that mediate resistance to their parasitoid wasps
- The community of insects and their creosote bush host plants
- The California wild radish, their herbivores and their pollinators
- The California Pipevine Swallowtail and its aristolochic acid-producing California Pipevine hostplants
- The community of insects that feed on steroidal alkaloid-producing bunchflowers (Melanthiaceae)
- Lonomia caterpillars, which are venomous and pose a public health challenge in South America
Now you can see why I like this quote from Charles Darwin (On the Origin of Species, 1859) so much (he corrected the spelling of mistletoe in later editions, but I think it is kind of funny so used the first edition here):
“How have all those exquisite adaptations of one part of the organisation to another part, and to the conditions of life, and of one distinct organic being to another, been perfected? We see these beautiful co-adaptations most plainly in the woodpecker and missletoe; and only a little less plainly in the humblest parasite which clings to the hairs of a quadruped or feathers of a bird…”
Because our work involves many different systems and levels of biological organization, I enumerate below some of our most exciting research discoveries, from the most recent to the earliest, on the evolution of species interactions. I included links to the peer-reviewed papers, which are all collaborative and the first authors are noted, although please click on the links to find all of the co-authors, whom I don't list below for the sake of brevity. I don't list findings of preprints yet because they are still in the process of being vetted by colleagues through peer review.
- The genome sequence of the invasive California wild radish confirms that this recent arrival to California is descended from a hybrid swarm. This will serve as a foundation for the genomics research of postdoc Moe Bakhtiari. Led by Ph.D. student Nicolas Alexandre.
- Discovery of the first odorant receptors tuned to mustard oils known from animals (in the drosophilid fly Scaptomyza flava). These genes evolved through gene duplication, followed by subtle neofunctionalization and subfunctionalization. Led by former postdoc Teru Matsunaga, research associate Carolina Reisenman and research specialist and former Ph.D. student Ben Goldman-Huertas.
- A color polymorphism in desert clicker grasshoppers is explained by the presence of a large insertion-deletion variant maintained by balancing selection. Grasshoppers have notoriously large genomes, so we designed and implemented a new approach to detect structural variants using RADseq data. Led by former Ph.D. student Tim O'Connor.
- We discovered how the black-headed grosbeak pierced the toxic shield used by poisonous monarch butterflies. This bird is a predator of overwintering monarchs in the mountains of Mexico and we found that it has evolved the same cardiac glycoside toxin resistance substitutions in the sodium pump as those in milkweed-feeding insects, like the Euploea spp. butterflies whose caterpillars attack Apocynaceae plants (e.g., common crow). It has long been known that the birds were resistant to cardiac glycosides, but the mechanism was not known (see Linda Fink and Lincoln Brower's paper 1981 paper describing this here). Led by former postdoc Niels Groen.
- The first application of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing to re-trace an adaptive walk in an animal lineage. We found that additivity and intramolecular epistasis explain the evolution of resistance to cardiac glycoside toxins in the monarch butterfly that manifest across levels of biological organization. Three mutations together, but not alone, explain resistance to these heart poisons at the biochemical, physiological, and organismal levels. Led by former postdocs Marianna Karageorgi and Niels Groen.
- First experiments to demonstrate the role of both multidrug transporters (Mdrs) and organic anion transporting polypeptides (Oatps) in mediating basal resistance to dietary cardiac glycoside toxins in whole animals (using Drosophila melanogaster). Led by former postdoc Niels Groen.
- Discovery of widespread bacterial toxin genes (cytolethal distending toxin subunit B) in insect genomes. Led by Ph.D. student Kirsten Verster.
- Herbivore (Scaptomyza nigrita) thermal preferences (they like it hot) explain differences in herbivory rates between open sun and evergreen shade habitats at high elevation first discovered by Svata Louda and colleagues, which in turn impacts the evolution of host plant phenotypes. Remarkably, this differential herbivory influences the evolution of resistance to herbivory in bittercress (Cardamine cordifolia), and has driven a shift in flowering phenology between habitats and an attenuated shade avoidance response in plants living under the spruce-fir canopy. Led by Ph.D. student Nicolas Alexandre and former Ph.D. students Parris Humphrey and Andrew Gloss.
- The first experimental demonstration of intra-host competition between parasite genotypes in nature coupled with a population genetic study measuring relatedness between these long-lived parasite individuals within and between hosts (using desert mistletoes and their mesquite and acacia hosts). Led by collaborator Kelsey Yule and former postdoc Paul Nabity.
- The first studies combining laboratory and field experiments to understand how diversity and abundance of phyllosphere (leaf-dwelling) bacteria predicts intensity of herbivory in nature, and why, via the activation of the jasmonate signaling pathway and subsequent repression of the salicylate pathway. Led by former Ph.D. student Parris Humphrey.
- Prior infection Arabidopsis thaliana with Pseudomonas syringae bacteria influences systemic susceptibility to herbivory through the ethylene signaling pathway and by suppressing the reactive oxygen burst. Co-infection and priority effects are the norm in nature, but understanding molecular mechanisms underlying them has been difficult. Led by former postdoc Niels Groen.
- Pinpointing of the ancient origin of signaling cross-talk between salicylate and jasmonate pathways in plants, which both bacterial pathogens (mainly regulated by salicylate) and herbivores (mainly regulated by jasmonate) have exploited. When the salicylate pathway is induced, the jasmonate pathway is repressed and vice versa. Led by collaborator Jennifer Thaler and former Ph.D. student Parris Humphrey.
- Humans and drosphilid flies use the same pathway to detoxify isothiocyanates (mustard oils), which has undergone adaptive evolution in Scaptomyza spp. flies that feed on mustards. Led by former Ph.D. student Andy Gloss at University of Arizona.
- Tracing the evolutionary loss of highly conserved yeast-detecting odorant receptors, yeast-attraction behaviors, and responses of antennae to those same odors, during the transition to herbivory in Scaptomyza.
- Discovery of a drosophilid fly nested in the Drosophila subgenus (Scaptomyza flava) that attacks Arabidopsis thaliana as an herbivore and a study showing how genomic resources and genetic tools developed for drosophilids and A. thaliana can be leveraged to study plant-herbivore interactions from both sides of the equation. Led by Noah Whiteman when he was a postdoc with Naomi Pierce and Fred Ausubel and when he began his new lab at University of Arizona.
- The first study linking inbreeding, innate immunity and parasite load in an endemic vertebrate species. Led by Noah Whiteman when he was a Ph.D. student with Patty Parker.
- A novel rationale for using parasites to infer host population history and its empirical demonstration in the Galápagos Hawk across spatial scales (geographic islands and incredibly, long-lived Galápagos Hawk hosts as islands). Long-lived hawks, which appear to receive their feather lice as nestlings, serve as islands from a population genetical perspective--each bird hosts a genetically differentiated population, even when the adult birds live in the same social group. Led by Noah Whiteman when he was a Ph.D. student with Patty Parker, and former postdoc Jennifer Koop.
- Parasites disperse move from prey (doves and goats) to predators (hawks) during predation events in nature, which influences parasite evolution. Led by Noah Whiteman when he was a Ph.D. student with Patty Parker.
- Emergent aquatic plants, which are used as oviposition sites, larval habitat and host plants for herbivorous species, increase water beetle diversity regionally. Led by Noah Whiteman when he was a M.S. student with Bob Sites.
You will note sometimes I say that something along the lines of the "first study to..." I don't do this to be prideful or to brag, which could be one way of interpreting these statements. There is nothing magical about being the first--if we hadn't discovered it, somebody else would have (if they bothered to study these questions), that's just how science works. Moreover, it was always a team of people that made the discovery, not just me. On the other hand, being the first to discover something meaningful in biology (yes, I know, who decides what that is?), is fun, and all of us do need to explain to colleagues, funding agencies, and the public why our research is important, because we wouldn't be here if it weren't for them. Not all new discoveries will be viewed as important or salient by others, which is what really matters in science given that it is a collective human enterprise. So, I only included such a statement when I thought this might be the case. I reckoned I needed to do this because of the diverse systems we use in our lab, which are sometimes incredibly obscure, and because sometimes people have trouble pigeon-holing what we do and what we've actually discovered. Plus, discoveries often require overcoming hurdles and they require the expression of intellectual leadership and courage. So this "first" notation is meant to celebrate the chutzpah needed in every one of us researchers. Our lab mantra is to listen carefully to feedback, adjust course where needed in light of it, but don't let naysayers grind you down. Carry on and do the work you think is important and that you love.
Appointments and Education
- Professor, Department of Integrative Biology (50%), University of California, Berkeley, 7/2021-present
- Professor, Department of Molecular & Cell Biology (50%), University of California, Berkeley, 7/2021-present
- Professor, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute (0%), University of California, Berkeley, 7/2021-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
- Associate Professor, Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, 1/2016-7/2021
- Principal Investigator, Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, 2009-present
- Assistant Professor (12/2010-3/2015) and Associate Professor (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, Royal Entomological Society 2020-
- Elected Fellow, California Academy of Sciences, 2020-
- Elected Member, Sigma Xi, 2020-
- Elective Member, American Ornithological Society, 2012-
- National Institutes of Health, Ruth L. 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
- Peter Raven Graduate Fellowship in Tropical Biology, 2000
Research Interests
Molecular, organismal and evolutionary basis of adaptations arising from species interactions, rooted in natural history.
My Story
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. Cultivation of a rational mind is a virtuous endeavor 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 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 at the University of California, Berkeley. 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 in the U.S. and I am inspired by their sacrifices as well as their hope for a better life.
In my mind, I am scientist, colleague, brother, son, uncle, husband, and friend first. But I am also a gay, first generation college student with rural, rust belt roots. To my knowledge, 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 in Integrative Biology. I might have been the first, but I hope I'm not the last. There is also no coincidence in the fact that as a "first" I'm also a white, cis-gendered man.
I have found academia to generally be an oasis: at each university where I have worked I came to believe that I belonged there even if that wasn't true when I first arrived. 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 people who have historically been excluded from STEM 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 (not just academia, but sensu lato), 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 more than anything else, a sense of humor.
I was born in southern California, near Huntington Beach, and when I was two years old, my family moved back to Duluth, Minnesota (where my parents were from), on the western tip of beautiful Lake Superior. My father, a 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 125-150 students that has long been closed as the children of the large farming families move away. 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 and furniture 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 college, they were supportive of my desire to obtain a college degree. I worked on a Holstein dairy farm (parts of the bog were drained to try to turn the region into a farmland) stacking hay at age 12, a really tough job for a small, skinny kid like me, except the farmers were incredibly nice and gentle people and I got to look up at the barn swallows building nests in the eaves of the barn between stacking the bales. I remember one day the farmer saw me struggling to pull down bales from the hay wagon (which weighed about as much as I did) as I tried to use my hay hooks to drag and load them onto the rickety elevator (more like an escalator). He walked over to me and I was afraid he was going to tell me to throw in the towel. But he just asked if I'd rather feed the cows than keep unloading bales. So, I got to get to feed the adorable 30 head of cows and their babies instead for a while instead! The farm could not let the cows out to pasture because they had to cut hay three or more times a summer to have enough to make it through the long winter. I also worked in a furniture factory in high school, first as a janitor and then as a furniture maker, 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 (where I ended up in college).
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). But the boreal forest was a magical place in which to find myself and my passion for biology. I remember gazing at the aurora borealis and hearing timberwolves howling in the dark winter nights (sometimes minus 40 degrees, 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 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), ruffed and sharp-tailed grouse. I had mixed feelings about it all. But, I remember finding liver flukes in the deer, and feather lice crawling on the ruffed grouse. I also recall watching monarch caterpillars feed on common milkweed plants next to the old railroad grade that ran in front of our house, in shock at their tropical gaudiness, and noticing the red long-horned beetles also eating the plants...little did I know I'd be studying them 30 years later. All of these species interactions fascinated me, which was rekindled in the Galápagos Islands 11 years later when I "dust-ruffled" lice off of those amazing Galapagos hawks for my dissertation work. My brilliant 7th and 9th grade biology teacher wrote on my term paper that "I had the mind of a scientist," an early vote of confidence meant a lot to me since I really hadn't met any scientists until I was in college.
The landscape in that part of northern Minnesota is a result of the retreat of the last glacial ice sheet, and it now resembles the taiga, a peatland with stunted black spruces and tamaracks as far as the eye can see. Little did I know my backyard 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.
My dad knew that I needed to get out of there and worked his connections with the former owners of Gunflint Lodge to whom he's sold furniture. He told me to apply to be a waiter the summer after I graduated high school, before I started college. But instead, at 17, I applied for one of the naturalist positions at the lodge, which was an hour north of Grand Marais on the Gunflint Trail and on the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and just across the lake from Ontario (which looked identical to the U.S. side since it was all wilderness!). It was a fancy lodge catering to professionals from the Twin Cities and Chicago. It took some chutzpah to apply for this position--an example of how naiveté has *sometimes* served me well. I would occasionally visit the late, great Charlie Cook, who (I believe) was the last member of his Chippewa Indian family to live on the lake, in a cabin all by himself. He welcomed me when I would paddle over to his dock with some news or gift from the lodge, and unsurprisingly, he *always* had a stringer of lake trout to show me, even though most of us could not catch any despite trying, week after week. He knew their secrets. Circling back to my high school experience, my life was touched again by the Ojibwe Nation. I once participated in the Close Up project, which sent me to Washington, D.C. when I was 15 years old. I met up with our guidance counselor at the Duluth airport along with three other high school students from the Orr School, which, at the time, was about as big as our school but farther north, deep in the Kabetogama State Forest. We shared the same guidance counselor because we were in a school district the size of Connecticut! The three women and I, who were Chippewa, became fast friends and a mutual support system as we navigated our time learning about our political system in the U.S. capitol--in a city we could never have really imagined being in just days before, transported from the forest. These experiences in Minnesota, which included a lot of time in solitude in the lands of the great Ojibwe Nation, instilled in me a love for the natural world that has fueled my desire to understand how it works.
I won a partial scholarship to one of three colleges my guidance counselor suggested I apply and enrolled at St. John's University, a small liberal arts college run by Benedictine monks in the tallgrass prairie and oak savannah. I came to terms with my secret love for insects after completing an entomology course, and late in college, I entered the honor’s program after a friend brought it to my attention (I had never heard of it) and completed a project on character displacement in Polistes social wasps. I then won an award for best presentation at a state-wide research conference for college students and the die was cast: the biology of species interactions was to be my destiny.
My deep phobia of mathematics in high school and college prevented me from doing well on the GRE quantitative section: my answers were sort of a random walk (which is both sad and funny in hindsight considering how much I love math now!). As a result, my options for graduate school were nil--UC-Berkeley rejected me too! But, Professor Bob Sites took a chance on me and I was accepted into this single M.S. program at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where I flourished, became classically trained as a systematic entomologist, received straight As in a set of advanced statistics courses by the late statistics professor Professor Gary Krause and completed a thesis on water beetle interactions with aquatic plants. With this under my belt and having sorted out my math phobia, I applied widely to Ph.D. programs in evolution. Then, I naively accepted the first offer I received, from the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL), which awarded me a Peter Raven Fellowship in Tropical Biology. It turned out though, that my education in ecology and evolution there was second to none despite the fact that it didn't have the name recognition of the bigger research universities. I highly recommend its graduate program for those interested in ecology and evolution. I was nurtured there by some of the finest faculty, postdocs and other graduate students around.
Although I was going to study social insects, I felt the pull of co-evolution again after arriving at UMSL but was in initially in lab that didn't study it. So, I needed to switch labs (but to which one?) and was also coming out of the closet (during the reign of George W. Bush, whose scapegoating of LGBTQIA+ folks was as shameful as it was damaging). I was close to quitting, when I met Professor Patty Parker in the coffee line one day and she asked how I was doing. "Not well" was the answer! After a chat, she suggested I accompany her group to the Galápagos Islands that summer as a helper because she needed students to work on a new disease ecology research program. Her initial focus was on the Galápagos hawk (Buteo galapagoensis) because she had studied it for years. One of the mysteries that the National Park had asked her to solve was whether the hawk populations were genetically distinct from each other, and what their colonization history across that archipelago might be. Illuminating its phylogeographic history using mitochondrial DNA sequences was difficult because there was little segregating variation. It was unclear to me, as an entomologist, if this project was a good fit for me. But serendipitously, later that year, Professor Bob Ricklefs had invited Professor Dale Clayton from University of Utah to give a research seminar in St. Louis and the penny suddenly dropped: I learned that feather lice of birds often co-speciated with their avian hosts. I decided we could test this the microevolutionary level and also use the more rapidly-evolving (on a per-year basis) genomes of feather lice to trace the hawk’s history in the islands. I would end up doing four field seasons in Galápagos, doing weeks and months-long stints living in a tent on the beaches of the islands working with endangered birds and their parasites. With other members of Professor Parker's lab and international collaborators, I live-captured hundreds of Galápagos hawks (Buteo galapagoensis) in Ecuador and Swainson's hawks (B. swainsoni) in Argentina and New Mexico. In addition to Professor Patty Parker, Professors Toby Kellogg, Bob Ricklefs, Bob Marquis, and Kevin Johnson were on my dissertation committee and they taught me a lot about what it means to do good science. They also had patience as I learned how to write scientifically and channel my energy into meaningful scientific work. The 40+ Ph.D. students from Mexico and Central and South America in UMSL's graduate program were a huge influence on my science and worldview as well. In particular, because I lived near the Missouri Botanical Garden and UMSL's close relationship with it, I had access to the MOBOT's amazing resources, including a plant systematics seminar every Friday that Professors Peter Stevens and Mick Richardson ran. I was able to freely take courses at Washington University in St. Louis, which continues to have a wonderful program in ecology and evolution.
My research gamble paid off: one of the louse species was primarily transmitted from mother to baby, and the louse population histories allowed me to trace the hawk’s colonization history in the Galápagos. This research, among the first of its kind had implications for understanding the processes that drive parasite diversification, one of the most successful guilds of life to have evolved. Elizabeth Arnold interviewed Professor Parker and me for NPR’s Morning Edition in the last year of my dissertation where we discussed the idea that parasites could be used as evolutionary tracers of their hosts’ histories (www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4676540). Along with collaborators, we also studied the interaction between host inbreeding, innate immunity and parasite load and provided a clear framework for assessment of disease risk. A former postdoc in my lab, Professor Jennifer Koop took this to the next level in a collaborative study that found that *individual* hawks served as island for louse populations from a population genetical perspective.
At UMSL, I taught in the NSF GK-12 program, which placed Ph.D. students in local high schools to improve our communication skills and to enrich the local science education curriculum. I taught at Wellston's Eskridge Memorial High School, an inner city St. Louis County public high school (now closed). We studied mate choice in guppies as a class project and some of the students later learned how to do DNA fingerprinting in Professor Parker's lab (the orange males were more often the dad than the blue males!). That tiny school reminded me of my own experience as a teenager and instilled in me a desire to devote myself to science education and to removing barriers to people who have been historically excluded from STEM by our society.
As I looked for postdoctoral opportunities, I wanted to be in the Boston area for personal reasons, and I also needed to learn more about genomics and how experimental approaches and molecular biology could be leveraged to study host-parasite interactions. Fortunately, Professor Naomi Pierce at the Museum of Comparative Zoology had been listening to NPR the morning of my interview. I knew about her work on parasitic blue butterflies and reached out to her—she agreed to host me as a postdoctoral scholar, but didn’t have funds, and every single fellowship I applied (including a nomination for a Junior Fellowship) led to a rejection. I soon learned why this might have gone down the way it did. Despite an excellent graduate experience and productivity to show for it, elitism in academia and the accompanying Matthew Effect (essentially, the rich get richer) not selection effects (e.g., actual differences in talent), explains most hiring patterns: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1400005 and https://www.pnas.org/content/116/22/10729. This was an important lesson for me to learn. Naomi did have a short term solution, although a risky one in hindsight: I could help teach the Animal Behavior course at Harvard as Head Teaching Fellow while we looked for funding. We decided the project most likely to get funded was with her collaborator, Professor Fred Ausubel, at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. They had been working for years together on a co-infection system using the genetic model plant Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis) as a host and the bacterial leaf pathogen Pseudomonas syringae and cabbage looper (Trichoplusia ni) caterpillars to study how infection by one parasite influenced infection outcomes if another parasite then attacked the plant (to me not that different than a hawk with four different parasites!). On the second attempt and with the help of Ph.D. student Adam Bahrami who had worked on that system, just as my teaching fellowship ran out, I was awarded a three-year Kirschstein National Research Service Award for Individual Postdoctoral Fellows from the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the NIH to work with them on this pathosystem. This postdoc, where I learned molecular biology and genomics, really changed my trajectory of research. If I hadn't been awarded the fellowship, I was planning to quit and go to law school (I know, I know).
During the first year of my NIH fellowship, Professor Pierce made an off-handed comment in her office one day, suggesting to me that we develop a genomic model herbivore for this system, since the host plant and bacterium had genomic resources, yet the herbivore did not. She mentioned that Professor Paul Williams, who developed Wisconsin Fast Plants, remarked once that he found leaf-mining flies attacking mustards, including Arabidopsis, and the idea was that since they were flies we might be able to leverage the tools of Drosophila. I then stumbled on a 1902 publication from the USDA by Chittenden reporting an obscure drosophilid called Scaptomyza flava that attacked Arabidopsis as a leaf miner. I then read that the Scaptomyza lineage was actually nested phylogenetically in the paraphyletic subgenus Drosophila of the Drosophila genus. I found leaf mines in wild mustards (Barbarea vulgaris) growing in the park where I walked my dogs in Belmont, MA in 2007 (www.the scientist.com/uncategorized/a-model-relationship-42998). Again, I was lucky: the flies turned out to be S. flava and readily attacked Arabidopsis in the lab at Harvard. With the support of my mentors, I spent the next three years establishing how the fly interacts with Arabidopsis by leveraging plant mutants in various defense pathways, developing the first genomic resources for the fly. I thrived at Harvard and grew to love it and the Boston area. I eventually felt like I belonged and even started the MCZ Lunch series around 2008 after I approached then Director Jim Hanken and asked if we could start one for postdocs and visitors to informally give presentations. He said, "Sure and we could provide refreshments and help you organize it." I really didn't want to leave Harvard, but my fellowship was running out and so I began to apply for jobs in 2009. Then the Great Recession hit. Although I had "soft" offers for tenure track faculty positions at five R1 universities, some, like one I had from UC-San Diego, were soon withdrawn (after the second visit!) as the financial crisis deepened. I happily accepted the offer that still stood from the Ecology and Evolution Department at the University of Arizona in 2010 and after six productive years in Tucson, I moved to the Integrative Biology Department at UC-Berkeley, where I now run my research group, teach, and serve the university. In 2021 I also joined the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology (Genetics, Genomics and Development Division) as a joint Professor with Integrative Biology.
My career would have gone nowhere without the support and effort of my family, friends, mentors, mentees and collaborators. This most precious gift and biggest honor of my professional life is to have had the privilege of mentoring (current and former) 11 incredibly talented and inspiring Ph.D. students and 10 postdoctoral researchers, in addition to the many undergraduates who have joined our lab over the years. They have taught me far more than I have ever taught them. My graduate student mentees roughly in order of their arrival in my lab (please look them up!) include: Dr. Parris Humphrey (NSF IGERT Fellow), Dr. Andy Gloss (NSF GRFP), Dr. Ben Goldman-Huertas (NSF GRFP), Dr. Tim O'Connor (NSF GRFP), Kirsten Verster (NSF GRFP), Nicolas Alexandre (Philomathia Fellow), Juliane Peláez (NSF GRFP and Chateaubriand Fellow), Hiromu Suzuki (Uehara Foundation Fellow), Jessica Aguilar (NSF GRFP and HHMI Gilliam Fellow), Diler Haji (NSF GRFP) and Rebecca Tarnopol (NSF GRFP). The postdoctoral fellows I've mentored include: Dr. Rick Lapoint (now staff scientist at NCBI), Dr. Jen Koop (now faculty at Northern Illinois University), Dr. Anna Nelson Dittrich (now a staff scientist at Boyce Thompson Institute), Dr. Paul Nabity (now faculty at UC-Riverside), Dr. Simon "Niels" Groen (now faculty at UC-Riverside), Dr. Cathy Rushworth (now a postdoc at UC-Davis and incoming faculty, Utah State University), Dr. Rebecca Duncan (Miller Fellow and now a postdoc at Emory), Dr. Marianthi (Marianna) Karageorgi (now a K99/R00 postdoc at Stanford), Dr. Teru Matsunaga (current postdoc), Dr. Rebecca (Becca) Tarvin (Miller Fellow and now faculty at UC-Berkeley), Dr. Moe Bakhtiari (Swiss National Science Foundation postdoc), and Dr. Samrhidi (Sam) Chaturvedi (current postdoc and incoming faculty at Tulane University). I work closely with Susan Bernstein, who helps run our laboratory, and Research Associate and neuroethologist Dr. Carolina Reisenman also helps lead research in the lab on behavior and Research Specialist Dr. Benjamin Goldman-Huertas, who is leading efforts to create transgenic tools in Scaptomyza species. Many collaborators around the world also deeply enrich our research.
Circling back to my childhood in the wilderness and long stints as a graduate student in the Galápagos, it is true that I am drawn to relatively untouched habitats because one can rather easily see evolution in action there. But in more recent years, the idea that evolution can only be studied at the ends of the Earth has been replaced by the appreciation for the fact that evolution happens all around us, within our bodies (in our gut microbes) and in our backyards. As we all can see, humans are transforming the Earth through climate change and habitat destruction (depressing, I know, but we can stem the tide if we so choose). So, I've turned my attention locally, in part out of convenience, in part to reduce my own carbon footprint, and in part because consistent interaction with organisms is what gives me the most insight into their biology. We now work on local drosophilid flies, their host plants (Fig. 1 below) and parasitoid wasps (Fig. 2 below). More recently we have started to work on andrenid bees and other insects specializing on bunchflowers (Melanthiaceae) (Fig. 3 below) , monarch butterflies (Fig. 4 below), pipevine swallowtail butterflies (Fig. 5 below) and their toxic pipevine host plants in the hills above my neighborhood in Oakland (Images by Julie Johnson). Professor Cassie Stoddard and David Inouye, Ph.D. student Nicolas Alexandre and I also work at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, on projects related to hummingbirds and their interactions with nectar plants.
My strong locus of self-confidence was necessary, but not sufficient, to bring me through my darkest hours of a long journey out of the isolated by beautiful Sax Zim Bog. What was necessary, was believing the people who saw something in me that I did not see in myself. These mentors, mentees, collaborators and friends supported and encouraged me to march to the beat of my own drummer and to never give up when I really wanted to achieve something.
Academia has given me an amazing life and in the end, I am still just a naturalist. I share here details of my journey simply to provide hope for those who might be able to relate to some aspects of it. It isn't necessarily fun to talk about some of these things. But role models were important to me as a budding scientist. We need more of them. I overcame some hardship, but don't get me wrong, I have a lot of privilege and my family loved me. Privilege is something all of us are compelled to understand and confront because only by doing so can we begin to change our society so that talent from all of its corners can achieve their dreams.
"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety..." (Act II, Antony and Cleopatra)
I am thrilled to be on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. 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 in the U.S. and I am inspired by their sacrifices as well as their hope for a better life.
In my mind, I am scientist, colleague, brother, son, uncle, husband, and friend first. But I am also a gay, first generation college student with rural, rust belt roots. To my knowledge, 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 in Integrative Biology. I might have been the first, but I hope I'm not the last. There is also no coincidence in the fact that as a "first" I'm also a white, cis-gendered man.
I have found academia to generally be an oasis: at each university where I have worked I came to believe that I belonged there even if that wasn't true when I first arrived. 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 people who have historically been excluded from STEM 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 (not just academia, but sensu lato), 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 more than anything else, a sense of humor.
I was born in southern California, near Huntington Beach, and when I was two years old, my family moved back to Duluth, Minnesota (where my parents were from), on the western tip of beautiful Lake Superior. My father, a 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 125-150 students that has long been closed as the children of the large farming families move away. 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 and furniture 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 college, they were supportive of my desire to obtain a college degree. I worked on a Holstein dairy farm (parts of the bog were drained to try to turn the region into a farmland) stacking hay at age 12, a really tough job for a small, skinny kid like me, except the farmers were incredibly nice and gentle people and I got to look up at the barn swallows building nests in the eaves of the barn between stacking the bales. I remember one day the farmer saw me struggling to pull down bales from the hay wagon (which weighed about as much as I did) as I tried to use my hay hooks to drag and load them onto the rickety elevator (more like an escalator). He walked over to me and I was afraid he was going to tell me to throw in the towel. But he just asked if I'd rather feed the cows than keep unloading bales. So, I got to get to feed the adorable 30 head of cows and their babies instead for a while instead! The farm could not let the cows out to pasture because they had to cut hay three or more times a summer to have enough to make it through the long winter. I also worked in a furniture factory in high school, first as a janitor and then as a furniture maker, 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 (where I ended up in college).
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). But the boreal forest was a magical place in which to find myself and my passion for biology. I remember gazing at the aurora borealis and hearing timberwolves howling in the dark winter nights (sometimes minus 40 degrees, 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 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), ruffed and sharp-tailed grouse. I had mixed feelings about it all. But, I remember finding liver flukes in the deer, and feather lice crawling on the ruffed grouse. I also recall watching monarch caterpillars feed on common milkweed plants next to the old railroad grade that ran in front of our house, in shock at their tropical gaudiness, and noticing the red long-horned beetles also eating the plants...little did I know I'd be studying them 30 years later. All of these species interactions fascinated me, which was rekindled in the Galápagos Islands 11 years later when I "dust-ruffled" lice off of those amazing Galapagos hawks for my dissertation work. My brilliant 7th and 9th grade biology teacher wrote on my term paper that "I had the mind of a scientist," an early vote of confidence meant a lot to me since I really hadn't met any scientists until I was in college.
The landscape in that part of northern Minnesota is a result of the retreat of the last glacial ice sheet, and it now resembles the taiga, a peatland with stunted black spruces and tamaracks as far as the eye can see. Little did I know my backyard 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.
My dad knew that I needed to get out of there and worked his connections with the former owners of Gunflint Lodge to whom he's sold furniture. He told me to apply to be a waiter the summer after I graduated high school, before I started college. But instead, at 17, I applied for one of the naturalist positions at the lodge, which was an hour north of Grand Marais on the Gunflint Trail and on the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and just across the lake from Ontario (which looked identical to the U.S. side since it was all wilderness!). It was a fancy lodge catering to professionals from the Twin Cities and Chicago. It took some chutzpah to apply for this position--an example of how naiveté has *sometimes* served me well. I would occasionally visit the late, great Charlie Cook, who (I believe) was the last member of his Chippewa Indian family to live on the lake, in a cabin all by himself. He welcomed me when I would paddle over to his dock with some news or gift from the lodge, and unsurprisingly, he *always* had a stringer of lake trout to show me, even though most of us could not catch any despite trying, week after week. He knew their secrets. Circling back to my high school experience, my life was touched again by the Ojibwe Nation. I once participated in the Close Up project, which sent me to Washington, D.C. when I was 15 years old. I met up with our guidance counselor at the Duluth airport along with three other high school students from the Orr School, which, at the time, was about as big as our school but farther north, deep in the Kabetogama State Forest. We shared the same guidance counselor because we were in a school district the size of Connecticut! The three women and I, who were Chippewa, became fast friends and a mutual support system as we navigated our time learning about our political system in the U.S. capitol--in a city we could never have really imagined being in just days before, transported from the forest. These experiences in Minnesota, which included a lot of time in solitude in the lands of the great Ojibwe Nation, instilled in me a love for the natural world that has fueled my desire to understand how it works.
I won a partial scholarship to one of three colleges my guidance counselor suggested I apply and enrolled at St. John's University, a small liberal arts college run by Benedictine monks in the tallgrass prairie and oak savannah. I came to terms with my secret love for insects after completing an entomology course, and late in college, I entered the honor’s program after a friend brought it to my attention (I had never heard of it) and completed a project on character displacement in Polistes social wasps. I then won an award for best presentation at a state-wide research conference for college students and the die was cast: the biology of species interactions was to be my destiny.
My deep phobia of mathematics in high school and college prevented me from doing well on the GRE quantitative section: my answers were sort of a random walk (which is both sad and funny in hindsight considering how much I love math now!). As a result, my options for graduate school were nil--UC-Berkeley rejected me too! But, Professor Bob Sites took a chance on me and I was accepted into this single M.S. program at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where I flourished, became classically trained as a systematic entomologist, received straight As in a set of advanced statistics courses by the late statistics professor Professor Gary Krause and completed a thesis on water beetle interactions with aquatic plants. With this under my belt and having sorted out my math phobia, I applied widely to Ph.D. programs in evolution. Then, I naively accepted the first offer I received, from the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMSL), which awarded me a Peter Raven Fellowship in Tropical Biology. It turned out though, that my education in ecology and evolution there was second to none despite the fact that it didn't have the name recognition of the bigger research universities. I highly recommend its graduate program for those interested in ecology and evolution. I was nurtured there by some of the finest faculty, postdocs and other graduate students around.
Although I was going to study social insects, I felt the pull of co-evolution again after arriving at UMSL but was in initially in lab that didn't study it. So, I needed to switch labs (but to which one?) and was also coming out of the closet (during the reign of George W. Bush, whose scapegoating of LGBTQIA+ folks was as shameful as it was damaging). I was close to quitting, when I met Professor Patty Parker in the coffee line one day and she asked how I was doing. "Not well" was the answer! After a chat, she suggested I accompany her group to the Galápagos Islands that summer as a helper because she needed students to work on a new disease ecology research program. Her initial focus was on the Galápagos hawk (Buteo galapagoensis) because she had studied it for years. One of the mysteries that the National Park had asked her to solve was whether the hawk populations were genetically distinct from each other, and what their colonization history across that archipelago might be. Illuminating its phylogeographic history using mitochondrial DNA sequences was difficult because there was little segregating variation. It was unclear to me, as an entomologist, if this project was a good fit for me. But serendipitously, later that year, Professor Bob Ricklefs had invited Professor Dale Clayton from University of Utah to give a research seminar in St. Louis and the penny suddenly dropped: I learned that feather lice of birds often co-speciated with their avian hosts. I decided we could test this the microevolutionary level and also use the more rapidly-evolving (on a per-year basis) genomes of feather lice to trace the hawk’s history in the islands. I would end up doing four field seasons in Galápagos, doing weeks and months-long stints living in a tent on the beaches of the islands working with endangered birds and their parasites. With other members of Professor Parker's lab and international collaborators, I live-captured hundreds of Galápagos hawks (Buteo galapagoensis) in Ecuador and Swainson's hawks (B. swainsoni) in Argentina and New Mexico. In addition to Professor Patty Parker, Professors Toby Kellogg, Bob Ricklefs, Bob Marquis, and Kevin Johnson were on my dissertation committee and they taught me a lot about what it means to do good science. They also had patience as I learned how to write scientifically and channel my energy into meaningful scientific work. The 40+ Ph.D. students from Mexico and Central and South America in UMSL's graduate program were a huge influence on my science and worldview as well. In particular, because I lived near the Missouri Botanical Garden and UMSL's close relationship with it, I had access to the MOBOT's amazing resources, including a plant systematics seminar every Friday that Professors Peter Stevens and Mick Richardson ran. I was able to freely take courses at Washington University in St. Louis, which continues to have a wonderful program in ecology and evolution.
My research gamble paid off: one of the louse species was primarily transmitted from mother to baby, and the louse population histories allowed me to trace the hawk’s colonization history in the Galápagos. This research, among the first of its kind had implications for understanding the processes that drive parasite diversification, one of the most successful guilds of life to have evolved. Elizabeth Arnold interviewed Professor Parker and me for NPR’s Morning Edition in the last year of my dissertation where we discussed the idea that parasites could be used as evolutionary tracers of their hosts’ histories (www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4676540). Along with collaborators, we also studied the interaction between host inbreeding, innate immunity and parasite load and provided a clear framework for assessment of disease risk. A former postdoc in my lab, Professor Jennifer Koop took this to the next level in a collaborative study that found that *individual* hawks served as island for louse populations from a population genetical perspective.
At UMSL, I taught in the NSF GK-12 program, which placed Ph.D. students in local high schools to improve our communication skills and to enrich the local science education curriculum. I taught at Wellston's Eskridge Memorial High School, an inner city St. Louis County public high school (now closed). We studied mate choice in guppies as a class project and some of the students later learned how to do DNA fingerprinting in Professor Parker's lab (the orange males were more often the dad than the blue males!). That tiny school reminded me of my own experience as a teenager and instilled in me a desire to devote myself to science education and to removing barriers to people who have been historically excluded from STEM by our society.
As I looked for postdoctoral opportunities, I wanted to be in the Boston area for personal reasons, and I also needed to learn more about genomics and how experimental approaches and molecular biology could be leveraged to study host-parasite interactions. Fortunately, Professor Naomi Pierce at the Museum of Comparative Zoology had been listening to NPR the morning of my interview. I knew about her work on parasitic blue butterflies and reached out to her—she agreed to host me as a postdoctoral scholar, but didn’t have funds, and every single fellowship I applied (including a nomination for a Junior Fellowship) led to a rejection. I soon learned why this might have gone down the way it did. Despite an excellent graduate experience and productivity to show for it, elitism in academia and the accompanying Matthew Effect (essentially, the rich get richer) not selection effects (e.g., actual differences in talent), explains most hiring patterns: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1400005 and https://www.pnas.org/content/116/22/10729. This was an important lesson for me to learn. Naomi did have a short term solution, although a risky one in hindsight: I could help teach the Animal Behavior course at Harvard as Head Teaching Fellow while we looked for funding. We decided the project most likely to get funded was with her collaborator, Professor Fred Ausubel, at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. They had been working for years together on a co-infection system using the genetic model plant Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis) as a host and the bacterial leaf pathogen Pseudomonas syringae and cabbage looper (Trichoplusia ni) caterpillars to study how infection by one parasite influenced infection outcomes if another parasite then attacked the plant (to me not that different than a hawk with four different parasites!). On the second attempt and with the help of Ph.D. student Adam Bahrami who had worked on that system, just as my teaching fellowship ran out, I was awarded a three-year Kirschstein National Research Service Award for Individual Postdoctoral Fellows from the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the NIH to work with them on this pathosystem. This postdoc, where I learned molecular biology and genomics, really changed my trajectory of research. If I hadn't been awarded the fellowship, I was planning to quit and go to law school (I know, I know).
During the first year of my NIH fellowship, Professor Pierce made an off-handed comment in her office one day, suggesting to me that we develop a genomic model herbivore for this system, since the host plant and bacterium had genomic resources, yet the herbivore did not. She mentioned that Professor Paul Williams, who developed Wisconsin Fast Plants, remarked once that he found leaf-mining flies attacking mustards, including Arabidopsis, and the idea was that since they were flies we might be able to leverage the tools of Drosophila. I then stumbled on a 1902 publication from the USDA by Chittenden reporting an obscure drosophilid called Scaptomyza flava that attacked Arabidopsis as a leaf miner. I then read that the Scaptomyza lineage was actually nested phylogenetically in the paraphyletic subgenus Drosophila of the Drosophila genus. I found leaf mines in wild mustards (Barbarea vulgaris) growing in the park where I walked my dogs in Belmont, MA in 2007 (www.the scientist.com/uncategorized/a-model-relationship-42998). Again, I was lucky: the flies turned out to be S. flava and readily attacked Arabidopsis in the lab at Harvard. With the support of my mentors, I spent the next three years establishing how the fly interacts with Arabidopsis by leveraging plant mutants in various defense pathways, developing the first genomic resources for the fly. I thrived at Harvard and grew to love it and the Boston area. I eventually felt like I belonged and even started the MCZ Lunch series around 2008 after I approached then Director Jim Hanken and asked if we could start one for postdocs and visitors to informally give presentations. He said, "Sure and we could provide refreshments and help you organize it." I really didn't want to leave Harvard, but my fellowship was running out and so I began to apply for jobs in 2009. Then the Great Recession hit. Although I had "soft" offers for tenure track faculty positions at five R1 universities, some, like one I had from UC-San Diego, were soon withdrawn (after the second visit!) as the financial crisis deepened. I happily accepted the offer that still stood from the Ecology and Evolution Department at the University of Arizona in 2010 and after six productive years in Tucson, I moved to the Integrative Biology Department at UC-Berkeley, where I now run my research group, teach, and serve the university. In 2021 I also joined the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology (Genetics, Genomics and Development Division) as a joint Professor with Integrative Biology.
My career would have gone nowhere without the support and effort of my family, friends, mentors, mentees and collaborators. This most precious gift and biggest honor of my professional life is to have had the privilege of mentoring (current and former) 11 incredibly talented and inspiring Ph.D. students and 10 postdoctoral researchers, in addition to the many undergraduates who have joined our lab over the years. They have taught me far more than I have ever taught them. My graduate student mentees roughly in order of their arrival in my lab (please look them up!) include: Dr. Parris Humphrey (NSF IGERT Fellow), Dr. Andy Gloss (NSF GRFP), Dr. Ben Goldman-Huertas (NSF GRFP), Dr. Tim O'Connor (NSF GRFP), Kirsten Verster (NSF GRFP), Nicolas Alexandre (Philomathia Fellow), Juliane Peláez (NSF GRFP and Chateaubriand Fellow), Hiromu Suzuki (Uehara Foundation Fellow), Jessica Aguilar (NSF GRFP and HHMI Gilliam Fellow), Diler Haji (NSF GRFP) and Rebecca Tarnopol (NSF GRFP). The postdoctoral fellows I've mentored include: Dr. Rick Lapoint (now staff scientist at NCBI), Dr. Jen Koop (now faculty at Northern Illinois University), Dr. Anna Nelson Dittrich (now a staff scientist at Boyce Thompson Institute), Dr. Paul Nabity (now faculty at UC-Riverside), Dr. Simon "Niels" Groen (now faculty at UC-Riverside), Dr. Cathy Rushworth (now a postdoc at UC-Davis and incoming faculty, Utah State University), Dr. Rebecca Duncan (Miller Fellow and now a postdoc at Emory), Dr. Marianthi (Marianna) Karageorgi (now a K99/R00 postdoc at Stanford), Dr. Teru Matsunaga (current postdoc), Dr. Rebecca (Becca) Tarvin (Miller Fellow and now faculty at UC-Berkeley), Dr. Moe Bakhtiari (Swiss National Science Foundation postdoc), and Dr. Samrhidi (Sam) Chaturvedi (current postdoc and incoming faculty at Tulane University). I work closely with Susan Bernstein, who helps run our laboratory, and Research Associate and neuroethologist Dr. Carolina Reisenman also helps lead research in the lab on behavior and Research Specialist Dr. Benjamin Goldman-Huertas, who is leading efforts to create transgenic tools in Scaptomyza species. Many collaborators around the world also deeply enrich our research.
Circling back to my childhood in the wilderness and long stints as a graduate student in the Galápagos, it is true that I am drawn to relatively untouched habitats because one can rather easily see evolution in action there. But in more recent years, the idea that evolution can only be studied at the ends of the Earth has been replaced by the appreciation for the fact that evolution happens all around us, within our bodies (in our gut microbes) and in our backyards. As we all can see, humans are transforming the Earth through climate change and habitat destruction (depressing, I know, but we can stem the tide if we so choose). So, I've turned my attention locally, in part out of convenience, in part to reduce my own carbon footprint, and in part because consistent interaction with organisms is what gives me the most insight into their biology. We now work on local drosophilid flies, their host plants (Fig. 1 below) and parasitoid wasps (Fig. 2 below). More recently we have started to work on andrenid bees and other insects specializing on bunchflowers (Melanthiaceae) (Fig. 3 below) , monarch butterflies (Fig. 4 below), pipevine swallowtail butterflies (Fig. 5 below) and their toxic pipevine host plants in the hills above my neighborhood in Oakland (Images by Julie Johnson). Professor Cassie Stoddard and David Inouye, Ph.D. student Nicolas Alexandre and I also work at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, on projects related to hummingbirds and their interactions with nectar plants.
My strong locus of self-confidence was necessary, but not sufficient, to bring me through my darkest hours of a long journey out of the isolated by beautiful Sax Zim Bog. What was necessary, was believing the people who saw something in me that I did not see in myself. These mentors, mentees, collaborators and friends supported and encouraged me to march to the beat of my own drummer and to never give up when I really wanted to achieve something.
Academia has given me an amazing life and in the end, I am still just a naturalist. I share here details of my journey simply to provide hope for those who might be able to relate to some aspects of it. It isn't necessarily fun to talk about some of these things. But role models were important to me as a budding scientist. We need more of them. I overcame some hardship, but don't get me wrong, I have a lot of privilege and my family loved me. Privilege is something all of us are compelled to understand and confront because only by doing so can we begin to change our society so that talent from all of its corners can achieve their dreams.
