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Gender Equity in STEM

1/22/2021

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I'm working with a fantastic group on a grant to the NSF Advance program focused on gender equity on the faculty in STEM disciplines.  We are focused on three major sets of activities to improve recruitment and retention, and to support leadership in their equity efforts with an intersectional lens. I'm really excited about the possibilities. I love how writing a grant proposal allows me to envision a different future - whether it's eco-evolutionary research or gender equity - it's thrilling.  However, another important part of writing a proposal like this is thinking about the budget - the nuts and bolts of how to get the work done. It's not my favorite part of grant writing, but it's crucial to link the pie-in-the-sky fantasies with the doing of the work.

The grant, if funded is relatively small. A million dollars. A million dollars is small??  Yes!! It is. The work needs to be managed by someone - so we need a project manager, we need to improve our capacities for qualitative research, and for training of members of search committees and POOF, it's all gone. As part of the program, we are (rightly) required to conduct internal (formative) evaluation and external (summative) evaluation as well.  Add those expenses in and we're way over budget. Happily, the administration wants this work done, and wants to support the efforts, so they are prioritizing covering some of the personnel costs.  I think it's got the budget in a reasonable state, where the work we're proposing can actually be accomplished.

Why me, you might ask? Why am I leading this effort? Well, I've been working on gender equity, and thinking about that writ large, for 10 years now, and I feel really lucky to have developed strong relationships across the university in that time. While I'm not the disciplinary expert, I work with the disciplinary experts well. Folks in the Provost's office, folks in Equal Opportunity, folks in Institutional Research, folks in the VP for Diversity office, the STEM center, not to mention colleagues from other STEM disciplines...  They are _great_. I feel so lucky to be able to draw on all their expertise. Fingers crossed we can finish this proposal strong and get funded. The competition will be fierce, I'm sure!
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China

5/24/2018

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Last fall, George Heimpel invited me to help organize a session on Evolution in Biological Control at the First International Congress on Biological Control in Beijing. It was just held last week, and it was amazing. It was my first time to China.

I was able to convince a bunch of awesome people to come speak at the meeting. Zehua Zhang and Xiongbing Tu co-organized the session with me and they were great to work with.
Jen White (USA) led off with a keynote on how variation within a host species can determine community composition of natural enemies. We also had:
Heinz Müller-Schärer (Switzerland)
Elodie Vercken (France)
Marie Claude Bon (France)
Sibao Wang (China)
Leo Beukeboom (Netherlands)
Iain Patterson (South Africa)
Ellyn Bitume (US)
Stephen Goldson (New Zealand)
Tania Zavezio (Chile)
Zehua and I  gave talks, too.
Pretty nice world-wide coverage, eh?

It was an amazing experience being there. I didn't realize that great hospitality is core to Chinese culture. Zehua Zhang and Xiongbing Tu hosted two amazing meals. Then I left Beijing with Jianqing Ding to go to Kaifeng, where Ding (yes, he mostly goes by his last name with foreigners) works. The Chinese system seems a lot like the Swiss and German systems, where there are relatively few Professors, but their groups are quite large, and include something like  Assistant Professors who teach and do research (Professors don't have to teach.)

I gave a seminar there, and one of the assistant professors in Ding's lab group, Xuefang Yang took charge of my visit. She not only was a great host scientifically, but also took me around to see some of the local sites. Kaifeng is a "small city" of just under 5 million people. It used to be the seat of the emperors, and so has some great historical sites, as well as a most amazing pagoda garden.
The food was outstanding. This fish is a fresh-water fish, deliciously prepared, and rather stunning. There were so many different kinds of succulent tender greens. Mmmmm. I'd love to go back!

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Eco-evolutionary dynamics

11/28/2017

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Bigger, better, stronger, faster.....  Adaptation is incredibly powerful. I know that. I'm an evolutionary ecologist who studies these things. But wow, adaptation can drive changes in population size and rate of spread across a new habitat even faster than I would have predicted.  In a new paper in PNAS, Marianna Szucs and Megan Vahsen (co-first authors), along with me and colleagues Brett Melbourne and Topher Weiss-Lehman, have shown that in only 6 generations, adaptation increases rate of spread across a new habitat more than 40% and bumps up population size close to 200% relative to populations that can't adapt*.  So, all those examples, and there are many of them, of introduced populations that have adapted to their new ranges? Likely adaptation has driven  population size, carrying capacity in the new environment, and the rate and distance spread from areas of introduction. Evolution is powerful powerful stuff.

* Just how does one prevent adaptation, you ask? We census the populations, and then replace individuals one-for-one each generation. The replacement beetles come from a large population that isn't exposed to the novel habitat, so can't adapt to it. That population is also large enough that drift and inbreeding are minimal over the course of a short 6 generation experiment. So, even in a sexual species, it is possible to effectively stop evolution.
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My crystal ball

1/27/2017

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The holy grail in science is to be able to predict the future with reasonable confidence. In the world of climate change and biological invasions, one thing we'd like to predict with confidence is how quickly species will spread from one location to another. Theory and empirical research (e.g. on cane toads and ladybirds), suggests that dispersal ability and/or propensity will increase at the expanding edge.

Basically, individuals out along the wave front are individuals that tend to disperse. There they are, looking for mates, and boom! the other ones out there are ones that also had that urge to disperse. And then voilà, their offspring? You guessed it, they are super dispersers.

We tested these ideas using Tribolium beetles as a model system. We put them into constructed landscapes, and let the populations disperse and grow for 8 generations. One set of populations did so without disturbance (other than censuses and getting fresh food). They could thus naturally develop the spatial population structure that makes it so that individuals that disperse most are found at the expansion edge. Another set of populations was shuffled each generation at census time, so that they could expand and spread but without developing spatial population structure. We found that yes indeed, individuals at the expanding edge of a population disperse more than those from the range core.

However, although the mean change is for population structure to lead to faster range expansion, there was more variation in the structured landscapes than in the shuffled ones. This is partly due to reductions in fitness at the expanding front. That (evidence points to gene surfing) is a post for another day. But the haphazard combination of faster but variable movement with lower and variable fitness, leads to more variable outcomes all together.

So, we can predict, reliably, that evolution of population structure increases invasion speed and makes it more variable. Understanding the magnitude of the variation is part of prediction! I said we want to predict with confidence... We may have a large prediction interval, but we can be more confident in the upper and lower bounds now.

Science. It rocks.

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Here and there

11/10/2016

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Three months into a year in Montpellier, France. While I'd like to say I'm less busy here, I've been incredibly busy! I'm working on a new invasive crop pest: Drosophila suzukii. It is a problem all across the US, including Colorado, and all across Europe. I'm really enjoying learning new techniques and getting into the lab more.

I've also had one visit from family - my sister and my mom. We went to Barcelona for 4 days!! What an amazing city. It was so wonderful to have my sister, who's Spanish is great, with us. Catalan is the primary language, but Spanish was really helpful. Check out the photo below - just a phone picture from inside the Bascilica Sagrada Familia. Inspiring.

It's interesting, though - my last sabbatical I disconnected a bit more from CSU. This time, there are many things I'm seeing pass by that I'm so sorry to miss. At this stage in my career I really want to be able to contribute to the U more. I'm applying for two important posts and being away might make me a less appealing candidate. We shall see. With a little luck, if I don't get these, other opportunities will arise. Interestingly, though, in academia as many jobs or positions have 3, 5 or many year terms, if you miss out on the initial opportunity, breaking in later can prove challenging.

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Good cities

7/21/2016

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I was in Berkeley after a family reunion recently, and got to visit the amazing women from my college ultimate frisbee team. I love Berkeley. Every time I'm there I wonder how it has come to pass that as a 5th generation native Californian (deep roots, for the U.S.!) I no longer live there. Ah well. Then coming back to Fort Collins, I think - wow, what a great town. And yet...  We will only be here for another week plus, and it's off to Montpellier for the year. Three fabulous cities - I'm lucky to have one my past, one my present and more distant future, and one my near future.
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Hope Jahren - yep, she sure can write.

4/29/2016

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I finished Lab Girl – it’s a wonderful book. Read it if you’re an academic, read it if you’re not.
 
It took me a while to finish, despite being a “page turner”. I took a break after getting about half way through – unable to read more for the moment. I think I had expected to be able to identify more with Jahren – we are about the same age, we are both academic biologists, we are both women who had children relatively late in life. I thought I would see myself in her, and when I didn’t, I was disappointed, and put the book down for a while.
 
I kept thinking about that person, that person who is not me though superficially similar, and was curious what happened next, so eventually, I started in again. I’m glad I did. I loved how chapters move fluidly between describing the life of plants to describing the life of the writer, and how those plants and how that person, had to struggle wildly to keep their leaves in the light.
 
I think Jahren describes some of the peculiarities of academic culture particularly well – how grants get funded, how research is paid for, why basic research is important. Those parts I could relate to. I could also relate as a mother  -  how impossibly beautiful my children are. I long to be present if or when they, too, give in to biology and have children of their own. The two brief pages in which Jahren mourns and celebrates her granddaughter to be brought me to tears.
 
What I had more difficulty relating to is Jahren's research partnership with Bill, her wildly unsafe and inappropriate behavior at times around the lab and on the road, her certainty from childhood that science was her path. I also can’t quite relate to her amazing ability to claim her own existence as important, special, worth putting down on paper. I deeply admire it, however, and while reading, I wondered often, ‘What must it be like to be inside that head? … to be able to fully claim this life she leads?’ She inspires me to claim that for myself - the importance of my own life, to me and to those I’m lucky enough to be loved by. I, too, am worthy.
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Extinction is forever,

8/10/2015

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...but rare means there's still time. (Who said that?).

This quote brings home the critical importance of not letting populations fall into the extinction abyss. We need to rescue species from that fate. But how to do it? Often their habitat is a fraction the size it once was, and likely degraded and polluted, too. In the time required to restore habitats, species can go extinct.

We need tools to give us time. My coauthors and I demonstrate in our new paper in PNAS (!!) that migration can be that tool. Apologies for the paywall, email me for a copy.

But what kinds of migrants? When populations are small, they can go extinct just by chance. Increasing their size might help. But when populations find themselves in a degraded environment, they need to adapt to survive. Also, those same populations, being small, become inbred. Just a few migrants can increase genetic variation and reduce inbreeding.

So do we want a lot of migrants to overcome demographic stochasticity, or just a few migrants with the right genes to rescue our populations?

One good way to answer this question is by using a model experimental system. We used Tribolium flour beetles, and gave struggling populations either lots of extra individuals to increase size, or just a few genetically distinct individuals to reduce inbreeding and enhance adaptive potential.

Which works best? Just adding individuals with the right genes is more effective than lots of individuals that don't necessarily have the right genes. The good news is that even without efforts to rescue populations with migration they evolved higher fitness.

This last is somewhat surprising. Much research thus far on what has been called "evolutionary rescue" (essentially adaptive evolution that enables a population to avoid extinction) has focused on large populations of organisms that aren't obligately sexual. Our work shows that even obligately sexual diploids with small populations can adapt quickly enough to avoid extinction, at least under some conditions.
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SciComm and the insect zoo: girls and boys, local vs exotic diversity

6/26/2015

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Today I visited the daycare my daughters' used to go to with specimens from the insect zoo. So fun! I love the enthusiasm the kids have for all things living. I also notice that the girls are generally much more interested in holding the animals than the boys. I wonder where that difference in socialization comes in. I think it is found in differences in interest in animals with backbones, too. In trying to learn about research on that (yes, I'm procrastinating), I came across this interesting article: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0023152

It turns out kids are more interested in exotic biodiversity they only know of virtually to local real biodiversity. I'm glad I found that. I think next time I do an insect zoo visit I'll include locally collected insects and spiders so that they can get to know what is here, and appreciate that, too.
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National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education

5/28/2015

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There is so much to say about NCORE that I don't know where to begin. For the moment, suffice to say that I'm learning a lot. Much of it, I should already know. No time like the present to learn more.

I came understanding white privilege superficially, and understand it better now.  I have more to learn.
I came thinking that as a scientist I could be an ally. Yes, I can be more than that - I can be an activist.
I came admiring women of color. I'm in awe of so many fabulous women I've had the honor of meeting.

I also have a huge reading list. I'll compile it here soon.
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    Ruth Hufbuaer

    Occasional thoughts about academia and science, and stuff. I like....  stuff

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