career + research

Career

Craven’s Nursery

I was raised in a safe, privileged neighborhood by my always supportive parents, Lida and Vern. I had a simple career path. While in high school I worked at Craven’s Nursery, where I learned different perspectives from working people who I would not otherwise have met in my white-collar neighborhood.

University of Richmond

I completed my undergraduate degree at the University of Richmond, where I was surrounded by privilege. As a rare botany student there I was fortunate to be mentored by a botany professor who guided me through three research projects while teaching me scientific writing.

Cornell University

I earned my doctorate degree at Cornell University. Professors there taught me to reason from first principles and challenge established norms, which became the two foundations for my scientific career. This was my first opportunity to work with fellow students and colleagues who have diverse international backgrounds.

Ohio State University

I spent a year as a postdoc at Ohio State University, where I was fortunate to successfully engage with dynamic colleagues on many unplanned projects that grew out of our discussions. These engagements enabled me to successfully complete my postdoc despite my failure to complete lab projects.

Colorado State University

I began as a tenure-track assistant professor at Colorado State University and resigned as a professor 21.5 years later, at the age of 50, to begin my motorcycle travels. I had one of the best jobs in the world—working on what I wanted, with who I wanted, and when I wanted. I did so while teaching courses and students that I wanted to teach, doing service of my choice as an associate editor for scientific journals and as curator of the herbarium, and living in a great town.

This trip

I began planning this trip while in graduate school. Over the years I became book-smart about travel while at home, with occasional opportunities to test my understanding while traveling abroad, particularly during two sabbaticals in eastern Africa. During these sabbaticals I learned that I wanted to focus my energies in the developing world, where I had many of my most enjoyable and character-building experiences, could have a greater impact while teaching, and where I was also able to feel at home. I guesstimate that my current trip will take about five years. If it takes ten years then that’s even better.

Research

While in academia I worked on four general lines of research: systematics of the Celastrales plant order, phylogenetic methodology, critiques of other scientists’ work, and collaborations wherein I provided a phylogenetic context for colleagues’ research. These investigations were often complementary because I would encounter new problems in empirical research as well as reading other scientists’ publications, develop and test the effectiveness of alternative methods to address those problems, and then apply the best methods back to empirical data.

Most of my empirical work was on the systematics (phylogeny and taxonomy) of the flowering-plant order Celastrales, which consists of ~ 1,300 species in the families Celastraceae, Lepidobotryaceae, and Parnassiaceae. This lineage, primarily of trees and shrubs with greatest diversity in the tropics and subtropics, had long been difficult to delimit, both as a whole as well as genera within it. Together with graduate and undergraduate students in my lab as well as colleagues from Africa, Arabia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America, I was able to identify and name many natural subfamilies and genera.

As part of this work I was fortunate to spend months conducting fieldwork in Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, and Uganda. While in those countries, local botanists and I investigated the origins and spread of cultivation of Catha edulis (qat), which is a native species there that contains stimulants, which are concentrated in immature leaves. Qat is an important cash crop for subsistence farmers, and has cultural significance in several countries.

My work on phylogenetic methodology focused on identification of historical evolutionary signal while minimizing artifacts that we mistakenly incorporate into our analyses. My strengths in this context were understanding first principles of the field, attention to the details of how methods worked, and a willingness to challenge norms. I was fortunate to collaborate with friends, including some of my scientific heroes, who also contributed their complementary skills in computer programming and statistics. Together we worked on DNA sequence alignment, character coding, effectiveness of alternative analytics, gene-tree inference, and phylogenomics.

Error correction is fundamental to science because we inevitably incorporate errors in our advances. These errors are variously caused by limited data, misapplication of tools, overinterpretation of results, and simple human error. Furthermore, in our excitement to try new methods, which may be theoretically sound, we can fail to account for their limitations when applied to empirical data that do not satisfy these methods’ assumptions. I published numerous reply papers with colleagues wherein we showed errors in other scientists’ publications as well as how those errors may be effectively addressed. I even published a Ten Simple Rules paper on writing replies. These reply papers addressed topics such as quantification of phylogenetic signal and branch support, robustness of parametric optimality criteria to ambiguous data, and limitations of coalescent analyses that allow genes to have different histories.

Finally, I was fortunate to work with a wide range of colleagues, from outside my discipline of plant systematics, to provide a phylogenetic context for their research. I completed collaborations with ecologists working on stream insects, microbiologists working on RNA interference in mosquitos or methane-eating bacteria, molecular-evolutionary biologists working on ribosomal RNA or linear plasmids, and plant-molecular biologists working on gene families or selenium hyperaccumulators.

I ended my research career at just 50 years old. But I am satisfied because I exceeded all of my research goals; made many established contributions to my field; published 121 papers that have been cited over 11,000 times; and enjoyed collaborating with numerous friends, colleagues, and students.

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