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!

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.

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.

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.

...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.