Society-Wide Newsletter: Spring 2021

Society-Wide Newsletter: Spring 2021

Note: SICB Spring 2021 Elections are now open! Please read the candidate statements at the end of the society-wide and divisional newsletters, and vote here by May 15.

Message from the President

Melina Hale, president@sicb.org

Melina Hale

After such a tough year on so many fronts, I hope that this spring and the coming summer are looking up for you, whether that means getting a break, seeing loved ones again or resuming deferred projects.

For me, the SICB 2021 Annual Meeting was a bright light in the past year. The community pulling together – whether organizing the meeting and events, participating in discussions or making great virtual presentations and leading activities – to create a fun, educational and science-rich virtual meeting was amazing.

Particularly impactful to me and I know many others was programming on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Challenging, eye-opening, humbling and empowering are just a few of the word that come to mind when I think about those conversations. Another one is gratitude – for the opportunity to participate in this programming (thanks particularly to the efforts of the Broadening Participation Committee, the Public Affairs Committee and the Education Council) and for the community’s openness to share and listen. Grappling with these important issues is critical for science as well as society and is an ongoing priority for SICB.

The question on a lot of peoples’ minds is: What about the 2022 Annual Meeting?  With positive signs from the CDC and other health experts, we are planning for an in-person meeting in Phoenix in January of 2022 that integrates virtual components, although what those will be is still unclear. There are a number of factors that need to be thought through in considering this hybrid model for conferences, including having a robust and engaging meeting format, the capabilities of the venue and our contractual arrangements with them, meeting finances and, as this past year, our aim to make the meeting broadly accessible. Thanks for your meeting survey responses and other input; it really helps. The executive officers look forward to continuing the conversation with you and sharing developments in planning in the coming months.

On communications, a major goal for this year is to continue to increase transparency in SICB’s activities. A few of the current related efforts are:

  1. Regular member forums that provide updates and other information on the work  of the society. The first Member Forum is April 21 at 12 EST. We hope you can make it to hear more about meeting planning and other efforts and to ask questions or provide your ideas and concerns.
  2. Notification of Executive Committee meetings. All members are welcome to attend Executive Committee meetings where the business of the Society is conducted by elected and appointed SICB leadership. These opportunities are really to listen and learn about SICB operations and not a venue for community input (but we’re happy to hear that offline after the meetings!). There is always an Executive Committee meeting at the beginning and end of the annual meeting and they are listed in the meeting program. A recent ad hoc Executive Committee meeting was announced in the March Member Update. It is unclear whether more such meetings will occur in 2021 but, if so, we will announce them in future Member Updates.
  3. Later in the Newsletter you’ll find more information on the SICB website redesign project – we think the new site will launch soon and should make SICB activities more accessible. Thanks to the Web Redesign Committee for the hard work on the website!

Lastly, sparked by conversations on the value of SICB for different parts of the SICB community, we have established a Working Group on Primarily Undergraduate Serving Institutions (PUIs). Led by Jerry Husak, the Working Group will consider how SICB might better support members from PUIs. Whether you are currently at a PUI or interested in careers at PUIs, the Working Group would love your input on this short survey.

A number of other efforts are underway at SICB Journals, on Committees and Councils, and in Divisions that you can read about in this newsletter. We’ll also continue to discuss other priorities for the year at the Member Forums and cover them in future messages.

I always love to hear from SICB colleagues so please don’t hesitate to reach out (president@sicb.org)!

 

Message from the President-Elect 

Patricia Hernandez

L. Patricia Hernandez, president.elect@sicb.org 

Hello all. I am so happy to be starting my duties as President-elect. Chief among these important duties is overseeing the many volunteers that this Society relies on to function smoothly.

If you are interested in serving on one of our standing committees, running for office, or even becoming more involved as a student member please take a moment to fill in this volunteer survey. There are a few positions in several of our committees that will need to be filled soon.

 

Message from the Program Officer

Jake Socha, programofficer@sicb.org 

SICB 2021: Report from a Virtual Annual Meeting

We did it! We pulled off a fully virtual meeting, in a two-month format, unlike most other pandemic-era conferences. Please, everyone who participated, give yourself a GIANT pat on the back for helping to make it all work. As we have all experienced through the pandemic, many things can be done virtually, but they can also be extra exhausting. Everyone who presented a talk or poster, organized a symposium, workshop, meeting, or social event, and everyone who simply took part: thank you.

Here’s a recap of the highlights. We had a total of 1,133 contributed talks, 382 contributed posters, and 142 symposium talks across 12 symposia. In the first week of the conference (the ‘standard’ week), we focused attention on symposia and plenaries, and we heard wonderful lectures from a diverse array of voices: Cassandra Extavour, Martha Muñoz, Rosyln Dakin, Claude Steele, and Michaela Hau. We also focused on the Best Student Presentation talk sessions, which occurred on a pressure-packed first day, and were rewarded with fantastic science from fresh faces. Throughout the two month period, we had a robust array of 9 wellness events put on by the Public Affairs Committee (PAC), as well as 19 workshops put on by our members. We also had multiple conversations on allyship led by Kendall Moore, spurred by the live viewing of her film “Can We Talk 2: White Allies” and by ongoing societal issues. Those conversations were also an extension of an ad hoc society-wide meeting held on January 6, which was held in rapid response to the Capitol attack. Committee meetings occurred later in the month, concentrated in the week of January 25. Although all contributed talks and posters were presented asynchronously, presenters got a chance to talk about their work in one-hour live discussion sessions that took place in February. The end of the conference was marked by special sessions in honor of Vicki Funk and George Gilchrist—both were celebrations of their work and their impact on our lives—and then a society-wide closing ceremony and social. Speaking of socials, there were numerous socials throughout the months of January and February, including division socials and weekly gametime events put on by the PAC. It was quite a conference.

By the numbers, here’s where we ended up: 2,581 registered attendees accessed the online conference pages 664,511 times on a desktop computer and 139,050 times on a mobile device. There were 13,793 public conversations (largely, chat and comments on presentations) and 4,792 private messages sent. Given the difficult times and circumstances, this seems like a massive amount of activity and participation!

As of this writing, the conference survey is still active, so we can’t yet report on the results. But a few things were made abundantly clear from the experience. First, although the conference as a whole was a success, the virtual nature of things made it clear just how valuable in-person interactions can be. There’s only so much that can be done electronically—a good virtual conference is not a full replacement, no matter how strong. Second, there were a massive number of benefits of doing things virtually and with a relaxed timeline: it enabled content to be consumed at leisure, and it expanded access for people around the world to attend at far lower cost than usual. An offshoot of this virtual experiment is that we have built some potential new capabilities for our society, and we intend to adopt and adapt as much as we can for future conferences. We are currently planning and hope to roll out new features for SICB 2022 in Phoenix. Stay tuned!

Thanks to our previous symposium organizers!

We would like to give special thanks the organizers of the 12 symposia at the 2021 virtual annual conference:

Meredith Kernbach, Stephen Ferguson, Valentina Alaasam, Colleen Miller, Clint Francis, Omera Matoo, Maurine Neiman, Patrick Green, Alejandro Rico-Guevara, Ali Hansen, Patrice Kurnath Connors, Hayley Lanier, Lisa Whitenack, Robert Full, Janneke Schwaner, Tonia Hsieh, Craig McGowan, Kim Hoke, Nate Morehouse, Sara Wasserman, Jess Kanwal, Niko Hensley, Florent Figon, Jérôme Casas, Leila Deravi, Mercedes Burns, Sarah Stellwagen, Karen Maruska, Julie Butler, Margaret Byron, David Murphy, Arvind Santhanakrishnan, Caleb Bryce, Ana Jimenez, Ignacio Moore, and Blake Jones.

Look to the upcoming issues of ICB to see the outstanding papers that result from these symposia!

Upcoming Meeting: Phoenix 2022

Check out the “Upcoming meetings” web page on the SICB site for updates on the venue for the 2022 Phoenix meeting and program throughout the coming year. Yes, we are hoping to be back in person for this conference! Fingers are crossed.

Here’s the list of our exciting symposia for SICB 2022:

Society-wide symposia:

  • Causal mechanisms of interspecific metabolic scaling patterns; Organizers: Jon Harrison, Meghan Duell; Sponsors: DEE, DCB, DCPB, DEDB, DVM, DNNSB
  • Open source solutions in experimental design; Organizers: Kirk Onthank, Richelle Tanner; Sponsors: DCB, DCPB, DEDB, DIZ, DEDE, DVM, DNNSB, DCE, DOB, AMS
  • DNA metabarcoding across disciplines: sequencing our way to greater understanding across scales of biological organization; Organizers: Anna Forsman, Michelle Gaither, Anna Savage; Sponsors: DEE, DCPB, DIZ, DEDE, DNNSB, DPCB, DOB
Regular symposia:
  • The deep and shallow history of aquatic life’s passages between marine and freshwater habitats; Organizers: Eric Schultz, Lisa Park-Boush; Sponsors: DEE, DCPB, DEDB, DIZ, DNNSB, DPCB, DCE, DOB, AMS, TCS
  • Ecoimmunology: what unconventional organisms tell us after two decades; Organizers: Vania Assis, Stefanny Monteiro; Sponsors: DEE, DCPB, DEDE, DAB, DCE, DOB
  • Lesser known transitions: organismal form and function across abiotic gradients; Organizers: Charlotte Easterling, Mary Kate O’Donnell, Matthew Kolmann; Sponsors: DEE, DCB, DEDB, DIZ, DVM, DPCB
  • Morphology and evolution of female copulatory structures in amniotes; Organizers: Patty Brennan, Günter Wagner; Sponsors: DEDB, DVM, AMS, DAB, DPCB
  • Evolutionary conservation and diversity in a key vertebrate behavior: “walking” as a model system; Organizers: Haley Amplo, Alice Gibb, Sandy Kawano; Sponsors: DCB, DVM, DAB
  • Best practices for bioinspired design education, research and product development; Organizers: Marianne Alleyne, Aimy Wissa, Andrew Suarez, William Barley; Sponsors: DCB, DVM, DNNSB, DAB, DCE, AMS
  • Phenological plasticity: from molecular mechanisms to ecological and evolutionary implications; Organizers: Cory Williams, Lise Aubry; Sponsors: DEE, DCPB, DEDB, DNNSB, DAB
  • Integrating ecology and biomechanics to investigate patterns of phenotypic diversity: Evolution, development, and functional traits; Organizers: Lara Ferry, Tim Higham; Sponsors: DEE, DCB, DVM, DOB

Call for new symposia for Austin 2023

Looking ahead to the 2023 Annual Meeting in Austin, TX: It is already time to start planning symposia for the 2023 meeting. SICB welcomes symposium proposals from folks at all career stages, including early career faculty, postdocs, and graduate students. Organizing a forward-thinking symposium is a great way for you and your colleagues to bring a new direction to your field. It is also a great way for early career faculty and postdocs to increase their visibility and foster new collaborations.

If you are thinking about organizing a symposium for 2023, contact your divisional program officer(s) and cc me (ProgramOfficer@sicb.org) to discuss the appeal of your ideas, and ask for suggestions that could help ensure broad appeal across the Society. The submission site is a good place to get started and full of helpful information on how to pitch your idea. Keep in mind too that SICB reimburses symposium speakers for the full meeting registration fee upon submission of their manuscript to ICB. Submit your proposal here by August 23, 2021.

 

Message from the Secretary

Michele Johnson, secretary@sicb.org 

Michele Johnson

Like so many of you, SICB has been my science home for many years. Now, as the new Secretary of our society, I’ve been honored to see the work that goes into creating this home for all of us. In this newsletter, you’ll see contributions from more than 70 SICB leaders, and statements from 33 candidates who have been nominated to stand for election in one of the many officer positions.  This is a society that runs on the generosity and commitment of so many, and I hope you’ll take a few minutes to help us elect the new officers for the society and its divisions. Read the candidate statements, consider how you want to see SICB move forward, and vote! (Remember, if you attended SICB 2021, you are eligible to vote in this election – including all student members!)

Later this summer, we will have a special election for a wide-ranging slate of bylaws amendments. As our society is a dynamic one, we must continue to revisit the bylaws that govern our work, so please look for announcements about what changes are proposed, and how to vote on those changes, in the coming months.

There’s also been a good deal of interest and excitement about the possibility of SICB contributing to NSF’s new LEAPS initiative (“LEAding Cultural Change through Professional Societies). We’re still exploring how SICB might participate, and if you’d like to be involved in this work, please reach out to me or President Melina Hale.

 

Message from the Treasurer

Miriam Ashley-Ross, treasurer@sicb.org

With SICB’s first-ever virtual-only conference behind us, we can all take a deep breath and reflect with gratitude on the efforts of the executive officers (principally Jake Socha, SICB Program Officer, and Beth Brainerd, our newly-minted Past President) that made it happen. By all measures, it was an unqualified success – we had 2581 attendees from literally all over the world. I know that you all are very interested in how the virtual meeting worked out financially – but I’m going to have to disappoint you for this installment, because we do not yet have the final totals for expenses and revenue from the 2021 meeting. Remember that SICB uses a fiscal year running from July 1 – June 30; our FY 2020 ended on June 30, 2020, and we are still in FY 2021. I can state unequivocally that SICB is in sound financial shape overall – we have assets of over $2 million. Most of that amount is invested in various funds, and at the end of FY2020, the investments had lost $15,673 – unsurprising, given the pandemic. The good news is that those were paper losses; SICB does not have to sell off assets to make ends meet. The even better news is that since July 1, 2020, the stock market has rebounded, and we are currently up by ~$200,000. Thus, we expect our investments in FY2021 to show gains, not losses.

The annual meeting always dominates SICB’s budget. At the second Executive Committee meeting during the 2020 Austin annual meeting, we had no inkling that COVID-19 was on the horizon, and so we approved a budget that assumed that we would be having an in-person meeting in Washington, DC in January 2021. Over the summer, it became clear that the meeting, if it were to take place at all, would have to be largely, if not entirely, virtual. The Executive Officers began planning for the worst-case scenario: a completely virtual meeting. Costs had to be estimated for a wholly unfamiliar situation. Without boring you with the details, Burk and Associates, President Beth Brainerd, and PO Jake Socha put in a great deal of time and effort to finding a capable hosting service, eventually settling on Pathable. Costs for an entirely virtual meeting are lower than for an in-person meeting, but the revenues are as well, as registration costs were adjusted downward. The virtual Annual Meeting exceeded our projections, and in fact was the most well-attended meeting ever. For the 2022 meeting, we will definitely be in-person in Phoenix, but the enthusiastic reception of the virtual format has spurred the Executive Officers to plan for some virtual component to accompany the “normal” meeting. We do not know exactly what form it will take, but the Executive Committee approved a budget for FY2022 that includes money for online content (which will be offset by registration fees of virtual attendees).

As we move back toward “normal,” SICB is in excellent financial position to capitalize on our new facility with online tools that may increase international membership and attendance, as well as accessibility for domestic audiences. The Executive Officers are confident that we will finish FY2021 in the black, and be poised to grow in the future.

 

Congratulations to the Recipients of the 2021 SICB Awards!

2021 Dorothy H. Skinner Award

Anusha Shankar, Cornell University

Liming Cai, UC Riverside

2021 George A. Bartholomew Award

Roslyn Dakin, Carleton University

2021 M. Patricia Morse Award

Sara Hiebert-Burch, Swarthmore College

 2021 Libbie Hyman Memorial Scholarship

John Deitsch, Cornell University

Taylor Naquin, California State University, Fullerton

2021 John A Moore Lecture

Claude Steele, Stanford University

2021 Howard Bern Lecture

Michaela Hau, Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, University of Konstanz

2021 Carl Gans Award

Martha Muñoz, Yale University

 

Update from Communications Editor and Website Design Committee 

Molly Jacobs

Molly Jacobs, Communications Editor, comm.editor@sicb.org and Lou Burnett, Website Redesign Committee Chair

We are pleased to report that the website redesign process that began two years ago is finally coming to fruition!  For much of the past year, the SICB Website Redesign Committee has been working with Knockmedia, a web design company, on a new website for SICB.  The new site will be more organized, easier on the eyes, easier to navigate, and friendlier to mobile devices.  We are currently working to update and finalize the content on the new site.  Stay tuned for the website roll-out in May!

 

Update from the Editor, Integrative and Comparative Biology 

Ulrike Müllereditor.icb@sicb.org 

We would like to thank our authors and editors for helping Integrative and Comparative Biology successfully navigate through the COVID19 pandemic. The number of submitted manuscripts remained well above the five-year average and the time-to-first-decision remained at the five-year average. We conducted a study to monitor the effects of COVID19 on our authors and are happy to report that ICB has bucked the trend seen in other academic journals of women and BIPOC authors publishing less since the start of the pandemic.

ICB is proud of its collaboration with the Reintegrating Biology initiative.  We are grateful to the many Jumpstart participants who agreed to author Perspective papers on topics ranging from resilience, inclusion, to big data, and ICB will publish those papers in the 2021 volume of ICB.

We are grateful to the symposium organizers who continue to bring together authors around issues that matter to our members and to our scientific community. Papers from the 2020 symposia ‘Limbless Locomotion’ and ‘Reproduction: The Female Perspective’ are already getting a lot of attention, including from mainstream media.

ICB would also like to welcome new editors David Hu, Emily Taylor, Erica Westerman, and Kathryn Wilsterman, as well as this year’s guest editors Kelly Diamond, Nick Burnett, and Armita Manafzadeh, and editorial reviewer Felipe Cunha.

After our first bundle of papers on the topic of stress were published in 2020, ICB now welcomes new proposals from the SICB community and its authors. If you would like to bring together authors around a particular topic to write one or more papers, consider partnering with ICB. Aside from all topics around integrative and comparative biology, we particularly encourage manuscripts around equity, inclusion, and social justice, as well as science communication, STEAM, and issues that matter to our early career scientist community.

Finally, there are a number of ways to engage with ICB content!
  • Our journal blog regularly publishes blogs every Tuesday, featuring great content about our ICB authors and books or podcasts that will interest SICB goers.
  • SICB, ICB, and IOB now have a YouTube channel that we are posting more regularly on. Please email icbjournal@sicb.org if you’d like to submit content. One of our most recent posts from a 2021 ICB author gives an inside look on the feeding mechanisms of snakes.
  • This year, we also have products you can buy with images from our papers and art in bio blogs via https://fineartamerica.com/art/sicb. All proceeds go toward our SICB student scholarships.
  • And of course, follow us at @ICB_journal on Instagram and Twitter.

 

Update from the Editor, Integrative Organismal Biology

A.P. Summers, editor.IOB@sicb.org

This was a banner year for Integrative Organismal Biology. We handled more manuscripts than ever before and Oxford University Press shepherded the journal through the indexing process. That means all back content is now on PubMed, and the journal is indexed as an emerging source in the ISI universe.

On the editorial side we have three new faces working on manuscripts, Kory Evans at Rice University, Martha Muñoz at Yale University, and James Newcomb at New England College. The strengths of this new group are diverse – evolution, physiology, neuroscience, invertebrates, fishes, and imaging to name a few.  Furthermore these new associate editors share the ethos of the group that founded our journal: publishing science should be an equitable process in which peer review improves the science without assaulting the scientist.

Most of all, I want all of our society members to think of IOB when submitting and open access article. The journal has a higher AltMetric impact than our competitors, we have a great review process, and your contribution directly supports the society.

Subscribe to IOB’s blog via  https://iobopen.wordpress.com/ and our Twitter and Instagram accounts at @iobjournal and @IOBopen!

 

Primarily Undergraduate Institution Survey

Are you a faculty member at a Primarily Undergraduate Institution (PUI), or would you like to someday work at one? If your answer is yes to either of these questions, please take this short survey to help SICB understand how we can best support you.

Primarily Undergraduate Institutions are home to many SICB members, and their inclusion is important to the Mission of SICB. It is believed that faculty at PUIs are likely to attend SICB as early career faculty but that their participation decreases as their careers advance.  Thus, an ad hoc working group led by Jerry Husak (jerry.husak@stthomas.edu) will be formed to consider how SICB might better serve faculty from PUIs throughout their careers. The working group will recommend actions that SICB might take to support PUI faculty. Please join us!

 

Report from Broadening Participation Committee

Rita Mehta, Chair, chair.BPC@sicb.org 

The Broadening Participation Committee thanks everyone for their terrific attendance at our first virtual meeting! We were able to bring back Dr. Kendall Moore, documentary filmmaker and Professor from the Harrington School of Communication and Media from the University of Rhode Island. Kendall’s documentary, “Can We Talk 2: “White Allies”, a follow up to “Can We Talk: Difficult Conversations with Underrepresented People of Color on Allyship in STEM” was screened on the final day of the live meeting. The screening was followed by four live conversations on the topics of allyship, support for BIPOC and underrepresented members, and intersectionality. The final live conversation, which was held during the last week of the SICB meeting, was awarded a People’s Choice Award. The BP committee is grateful to Dr. Moore for the time and energy she put into making these conversations work for SICB members. We also extend much gratitude to our members who responded to our polls about the conversations throughout the month of February. These polls allowed us to tailor the final conversation to fit the needs of our attendees. Please let the BP committee know if there are any topics you might like to hear about or have any ideas for future BP-sponsored workshops.

BP’s support for the 2020 virtual meeting was in the form of Professional Development (PD) Awards. The goal of these awards was to help facilitate meeting participation. We were able to support 33 SICB members (6 undergraduates, 2 masters students, 15 doctoral students, 7 postdoctoral researchers, 1 faculty member, and 2 non-academic researchers) with these awards. Our committee appreciates all who showed up for the award recognition ceremony and made the fun and lively event possible. Funding for the PD awards were made possible by a generous donation from the Gans Collections and Charitable Fund.

Once again, BP organized the Mentor-Mentee program. We appreciate all who applied to participate. As the virtual platform allowed for extending mentor-mentee interactions past our typical January 3-7 meeting period, we invited participants of the program to provide feedback on their virtual mentor-mentee experience. We solicited feedback through a poll and received responses from slightly over a third of all of our participants (N = 34 respondents).  Everyone who responded was able to meet with their mentor or mentee at least once during the annual meeting and many met more than three times. One of the big concerns from members of our committee was whether mentors and mentees would find it challenging to navigate the different time zones. While we allowed participants to select what time zones they preferred to participate in during our initial poll, the vast majority of our participants checked the option “Being in the same time zone does not matter to me.” After the meeting, we were relieved to discover that our respondents felt that navigating different time zones was not a problem. Doctoral students comprised the largest group of participants in the program requesting participation as a mentee. We especially thank members of the Division of Ecology and Evolution and the Division of Animal Behavior, whose members had the most participants in the program. Some of the feedback we received suggested that SICB should try to make components of the annual meeting, such as the Mentor-Mentee program, accessible through virtual participation.

Last but not least, BP is very happy to announce the 2021 Call for Nominations/Self-Nominations For SICB’s JEDI Award for Promoting Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in Integrative Biology. Information for this award may be found here. BP JEDI Award Nominations are due by Friday, April 30, 2021. Completed applications including self-nominations should be submitted by Friday, May 21, 2021.

We look forward to planning and attending an in-person meeting for 2022.

 

Report from Development Committee

Lara Ferry, Chair, chair.development@sicb.org

Development Chair, Lara Ferry

The Development Committee bids farewell to Lou Burnett as our fearless Chair.  Lou has been at the helm for many years now.  I hope you all will join me in offering Lou our deepest gratitude for steering this committee, as well as his many other contributions to SICB.  Many, many advancements have been made under Lou’s direction.  I had the pleasure of working with Lou on this committee for two years, and also working with Lou when I was a Divisional Secretary and he was the Society Secretary.  Lou’s passion for this organization is beyond measure, and he has left me with very big shoes to fill, indeed. I, for one, am very glad he will still be around as a member of the committee to offer advice and wisdom.  Lou – I’ll try not to bug you too much!

Student Research Awards are given each year through the Grants-in-Aid of Research (GIAR) and the Fellowship of Graduate Student Travel (FGST) programs of the Society.  SICB recently established, through donations to the GIAR and FGST honoring particular individuals, named awards for the most outstanding applicants competing for these awards.

The following named GIAR awards were made to these students in 2021.  Congrats to all!

Named Honoree Student Winner and Institution
Steven Vogel Emily Webb, Arizona State University
Abbot S. “Toby” Gaunt Victoria Farrar, University of California Davis
Rosemary Knapp Laura Newman, New York University
Stephen Wainwright Thien-y Nguyen, University of California Riverside
William Dawson Joshua Manning, Florida State University
John Pearse Samuel Lane, Virginia Tech

Four awards, in particular, were approved recently, and now are named awards currently requiring donations to establish the award in perpetuity:

Rosemary Knapp Award:  Rosemary Knapp (1962-2019) earned a bachelor’s degree at Rutgers University and a Ph.D. at Arizona State University; she did postdoctoral work at Cornell University and was a faculty member at the University of Oklahoma. She studied endocrine systems in lizards, fishes, and amphibians. She was a long-time member of SICB, serving two terms as Program Officer for the Division of Comparative Endocrinology.

Stephen Wainwright Award: Stephen A. Wainwright (1931-2019) was a long-time Duke University biologist who was an early founder of the field of biomechanics. He applied engineering principles to organismal design and he explored life through art and especially sculpture. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Duke and a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. He was well-known for his passionate support of his many students. He was president of the Society (then ASZ) in 1988.

William Dawson Award: William R. Dawson (1927-2020) was an avian ecophysiologist who spent his academic career at the University of Michigan. He wrote his first paper on fossil sparrows from the La Brea tar pits in 1947. He earned a master of arts in 1950 and his doctorate degree in 1953 from the University of California at Los Angeles, where he was the first Ph.D. student of George Bartholomew. He was president of the Society (then ASZ) in 1986.

John Pearse Award: John S. Pearse (1936-2020) was an authority on marine invertebrates and intertidal ecology. He spent his academic career at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he was instrumental in establishing the marine science program. He earned his Ph.D. at Stanford University where he did some of the earliest marine biology research at Antarctica’s McMurdo Station. He was president of the Society in 2007 and 2008. (See the Experiences article he wrote in the Fall 2006 SICB Newsletter.)

If you are interested in contributing to these funds, we invite you to click the ‘Donate to SICB‘ link in the green box at the society’s website.  These have been added to the list of various specific funds to which you can direct your charitable giving.

SICB has many other ways in which you can invest, and through which we can, in turn, invest in our members.

  • We recently ended our 3-year Double Your Dues (DYD) Campaign where we have asked each member of SICB, including the students, to contribute over a period of three years the equivalent of SICB dues for one year.  We ended the campaign with over $13,500Thanks to all who donated through the DYD campaign!
  • SICB, along with Burke Inc, also manages invested funds that provide support for students to attend the annual meeting and support their research, support for symposia, lectures, and several awards. There are separate funds that are designed for specific purposes, including the ones mentioned above.  Without these invested funds, most of the SICB activities would not occur in their current robust form. Again, we invite you to contribute to these funds.
  • Also on this page, you will find information about Estate Planning, to assist you in planning a legacy gift to SICB.  Estate planning is a very personal endeavor and crafting documents to meet your specific needs can be done on a one-on-one basis. Please contact us if you have any questions.
  • Finally, a simple way to donate to SICB, without actually taking a dime out of your own bank account, is to name SICB as your charitable organization of choice in Amazon Smile. A portion of your shopping dollars will go to SICB, so long as you remember to shop on your Smile page. And, if you are in a shopping mood (it has been a ‘click to add to cart’ kind of year!), as always, remember to order your SICB Apparel. Show your support of SICB and its programs and benefit SICB at the same time.

Recognition of Donors. We are grateful to our members who have donated to the Society. Click here for the full list of donors in Fiscal Year 2020.

 

Report from Educational Council

Lisa Whitenack, Chair, chair.EdCouncil@sicb.org

Ed Council Chair, Lisa Whitenack

The Educational Council had a busy time at SICB 2021! We supported two TAL-X workshops: one on integrative creative writing into your courses (led by Chris Gillen) and one on biomaking and community partnership (led by Ali Hansen, Corrine Takara, and BioJam teens). We also supported the symposium “Biology beyond the classroom: Experiential learning through authentic research, design, and community engagement”; be on the lookout for papers from that symposium in an upcoming issue of ICB. We were honored to welcome Dr. Claude M. Steele, author of Whistling Vivaldi, as the plenary speaker for the John A. Moore Lecture. Dr. Steele talked about his past and present work on stereotype threat and how that affects students in STEM classrooms. If you have not read his book yet, we highly recommend it! Finally, we were pleased to award this year’s M. Patricia Morse Award for Excellence and Innovation in Science Education to Dr. Sara Hiebert Burch. You can find a profile on Dr. Hiebert Burch in this newsletter.

We need nominations for the SICB 2022 Moore Lecturer and Morse Award! Information about both of these awards is available under “Awards” on the SICB website. Nominations and supporting materials for both are due in mid-August.

The Ed Council also continues to support SICB members during this time of pandemic pedagogy. During the fall, we facilitated “pandemic teaching circles” that connected SICB members that were teaching or planning on teaching similar courses. 47 SICB members participated with 13 different course topics covered, from introductory biology to upper-level courses. Many of those members participated in more than one teaching circle. We continue to provide COVID-19 teaching support through maintaining databases for resources for online biology instructiononline guest lecturers, and SICB’s Research and Education Resources (RER) library.

The RER is one of our main areas of focus for 2021, working alongside the redesign of the SICB website. We would appreciate your feedback to help us figure out the best way for the RER to serve the SICB community; we are gathering information using this survey. Please take a few minutes to let us know what would help you!

 

Report from the Public Affairs Committee

Shaz Zamore, chair.PAC@sicb.org

Shaz Zamore

The SICB Public Affairs Committee (PAC) has had an exciting annual meeting. At this meeting, we hosted a collection of workshops and social events for the entire 2-month duration of the conference. We welcomed Danny Rankin from CU Boulder, who discussed Tech Tools for a Virtual World, and we also hosted Sara ElShafie for her workshop on Inclusive Storytelling. Both were well-attended! To offer relief from the stresses of the global pandemic, the PAC hosted Wellness Wednesdays, with discussions on healthy tech use, fermentation, herbalism and botany, as well as sessions featuring meditation, yoga, and pilates. We also held game nights on Saturdays, allowing people to gather and connect across disciplines, unwind, and have a good time.  The 2021 meeting saw the first year with Dr. Shaz Zamore as PAC chair and welcomes new members, Ryan Hulett and Drs. Sebastian Alvarado and Noah Bressman.

The PAC is continuing its efforts to foster an equitable and inclusive culture in SICB. This year, we focused our efforts on social media engagement as well as our workshops. First, the PAC social media team expanded from 2 people to 5, with impressive work from student social media ambassadors, Dani CrainBret HodinkaFadya Ruiz and Guadalupe Sepulveda-Rodriguez, who are led and managed by Noah Bressman. This year, in addition to partnering with the Broadening Participation Committee to share events with Dr. Kendall Moore, we also hosted an online roll call, which allowed members of the SICB community to celebrate and connect with other members of minoritized groups. We commend our new Correspondents for their hard work, and look forward to the changes to come!

The diversity of SICB is one of its standout hallmarks and the PAC is helping to increase it through its workshops. Sara ElShafie’s workshop, Inclusive Science Storytelling provided insightful knowledge on how to share one’s research with any audience and focused on sensitivity practices when communicating about or with underserved, underrepresented, or minoritized groups. The workshop was deeply engaging, with conversations that continued long after the session ended. We enjoyed working with Ms. ElSfafie and supporting her new business, Science Through Story, which helps academics improve their communication skills and extend their reach.

Finally, the PAC is happy to continue the enrichment of SICB’s communication efforts. First, we are proud to welcome the 2021 cohort of student journalists, Jackie ChildersEmily Lau, Peishu Li, Andrew SaintsingJacey van Wert and Sara Zlotnik. This year, we partnered with the Integrative and Collaborative Biology team to produce content for their blog. These stories focused on this year’s symposia speakers, offering a human touch to stories that are often rather technical. Please check out the ICB Blog to read their contributions, and other ICB blog content! These writers are also working on press releases, which will be available on the SICB website in the next two weeks! We are thrilled with our journalists’ work and look forward to working with them again in the future!

If you have successes to announce, such as paper acceptances, grant awards, and upcoming employment opportunities, please email us or reach out to us on Twitter. We would love to share your news with the community!

 

Report from Student-Postdoctoral Affairs Committee

John Hutchinson, Chair, chair.SPDAC@sicb.org

The hard-working members of the Student-Postdoctoral Affairs Committee (SPDAC) are listed here.

SPDAC conducted three main activities for SICB this year:

  1. We produced numerous “how to” brochures including advance distribution of “how to design a talk/poster” for SICB2021, and held “office hours” at the SPDAC booth, one per Representative.
  2. We made a video for first-timers to SICB/[virtual] conferences, featured on Pathable.
  3. We hosted our virtual workshop on “Transferable Skills in Academia and Non-Academia.”  About 75 attendees showed up. We first had a 30-minute panel discussion of skills/careers, then 45 minutes of breakout-room discussions. There was a lot of interaction with our panel of 10 experts on the topics raised in those rooms. Feedback has been very positive; even the guest experts commented on how they learned something about skills in careers.
SPDAC Chair, John Hutchinson

Also connected to the SPDAC activities and directed toward students/postdocs, the Royal Society (a SICB sponsor) held a workshop with SPDAC Chair JR Hutchinson on 9 February about “Increasing your publishing success (for early career researchers)” – a general overview of the entire process of peer-reviewed publication (not specific to Royal Society journals). This publishing workshop went well, with >50 attendees and plenty of discussion that filled the whole 90 minutes.

 

On to next year! For SICB 2022, we brainstormed ideas and settled on:

  1. We are working on a new brochure on mental health and (online) resources, including ways to cope for students and postdocs, to add to our repertoire of brochures.
  2. We will run a booth again, with our brochures and two main activities (e.g., at coffee breaks):
    1. “Rockstars” or other persons of interest in SICB (e.g., Division officers) available for chats at the booth, with reps and other students and postdocs there to keep company and facilitate. Sort of like DEE “Beers and brains” without the beer! 12 divisions/6 days = 2 per day.
    2. Skills workshops: 10-15 minute demos of discrete skills – making a figure, editing 3D graphics, yoga/meditation, scicomm, interview strategies, invisible skills, whatever! 12 divisions/6 days = 2 per day? We’d need to find suitable people attending SICB, from any career stage, to do interesting demos of a “skill” that can be acquired hands-on in a short time, so not something complex.
  3. Finally, we plan to hold a workshop on science communication. We thought we’d try to do this with volunteers from SICB expert attendees. We will feature a 90-minute session with rotating tables on:
    1. Sharing and composing stories about your science
    2. Art/editing scicomm audiovisuals
    3. Ways to maximize accessibility of scicomm
    4. Open software tools for scicomm (including art, editing)
    5. More? Free-for-all social networking time at end?

We will be developing these ideas as 2021 rolls onwards.

 

Profile of Patricia M. Morse Award Winner

Morse Award, Sara Hiebert Burch

Dr. Sara Hiebert Burch is the winner of the 2021 M. Patricia Morse Award for Excellence and Innovation in Science Education. Dr. Hiebert Burch is the Edward Hicks Magill Professor Emerita of Biology and Swarthmore College and a longtime SICB member. Her scientific research focuses on hypometabolic states and the influence of dietary lipids in birds and small mammals. She is currently studying the hummingbird microbiome.

Dr. Hiebert Burch’s contributions to physiology education, and to science education more generally, are numerous. Her publications in the field range from laboratory exercises and laboratories she has developed, to methods for teaching and assessing experimental design. She has supervised summer undergraduate research by students at Swarthmore, University of Washington, and the University of British Columbia, and has overseen dozens of independent study, summer, and thesis projects. Her dedication to fostering undergraduate research experiences has resulted in eleven manuscripts and more than two dozen abstracts that are co-authored with undergraduates since 2004. One of her nominators writes, “She has transformed the lives of students and positively influenced the teaching of innumerable colleagues.”

Much of Dr. Hiebert Burch’s service also relates to education and pedagogy. She is an active reviewer for Advances in Physiology Education and has facilitated numerous teaching workshops at institutions such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Harvard University. At SICB, she served on the Educational Council (2010-2011), was a founding member of SICB’s Digital Library advisory board, and chaired a symposium about the Digital Library (2007).

It is clear that Dr. Hiebert Burch serves as a mentor and inspiration to her students and colleagues, and that her dedication has carried over to future generations. One of her nominators writes: “In the same way that Sara’s teaching inspired my love of science and allowed me to engage authentically in the scientific process as a novice, I see the impacts in my own students.”

 

Remembering Former SICB Presidents

In the past year, we’ve lost three former presidents of SICB. Each of these were remarkable leaders, who impacted not only our Society and our field, but had meaningful, lasting effects on the lives of so many scientists as well.

William Dawson

Bill Dawson (1927-2020) was Professor Emeritus in the Department of Zoology at the University of Michigan, and served as President of the American Society of Zoologists, the precursor to SICB, in 1986. Please click here to read an account of Bill’s contributions, with a personal memory from Richard Marsh.

John S. Pearse

John Pearse (1936-2020) was Professor Emeritus in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and served as President of SICB in 2007-2008. Please click here to read a tribute to the wide-ranging impacts of John’s visionary service to SICB, by David Lindberg and Douglas Eernisse.

Stephen Wainwright

Steve Wainwright (1931-2019) was the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biology at Duke University,  and served as the President of American Society of Zoologists, the precursor to SICB, in 1988. Please click here to read a celebration of Steve’s life, with a summary of his influence by Mark Westneat and John Long, and a compilation of his personal impacts on more than 30 other scientists.

 

Candidate for SICB Program Officer-Elect

Janet C. Steven 

Janet Steven

Current Position: Associate Professor, Christopher Newport University, Newport News, VA

Education: BS Davidson College (1996); PhD University of Wisconsin-Madison (2003)

Professional Experience: Postdoc, Indiana University (2003-2005); Assistant and Associate Professor, Sweet Briar College (2005 -2014); Assistant and Associate Professor, Christopher Newport University (2014-present).

SICB Activities: Division Program Officer (DPO) and founding member of the Division of Botany; judge for divisional best student presentation competitions.

Other Memberships: Botanical Society of America, Torrey Botanical Society, Society for the Study of Evolution

Research Interests: Evolution of functional traits in plants; life history evolution and mating patterns in ferns; heavy metal hyperaccumulation as a defensive mechanism in plants

Statement of Goals: Although I am a recent convert to SICB for its relatively new focus on plants, I have been thrilled by the discovery of the many opportunities to indulge my interests in organismally-focused evolutionary biology. I have thoroughly enjoyed attending talks of all kinds and thinking about what we can learn through broad comparative approaches. Serving as a divisional program officer for the virtual 2021 conference provided an opportunity to think about the critical functions of our annual meeting and the role meetings play in the scientific community. Meetings provide not only the opportunity to network and share the newest science, but also space to discuss ongoing research, generate new ideas, and consider new approaches. If elected Program Officer, I would work hard to provide the high-quality, smoothly run annual meetings that members expect, while also promoting opportunities for discussion and idea exchange. SICB also provides a collaborative environment in which to explore interdisciplinary boundaries, and I would create spaces for members to germinate ideas related to convergence research across disciplines to address broad, fundamental questions in biology. In addition, I would continue current broadening participation efforts by promoting and supporting new members, members new to their divisional roles, and members proposing their first symposium or workshop. I am continually impressed by both the collegiality and the amazing science at SICB meetings and in the journals, and I would be delighted to serve as Program Officer.

 

Candidates for SICB Member-at-Large

Andrew J. Clark

Andrew Clark

Current Position: Associate Professor, Department of Biology, College of Charleston

Education: B.S., Biological Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park (2002); Ph.D. Ecology
and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Irvine (2009).

Professional Experience: Associate Professor, Department of Biology, College of Charleston (2016-present);  Visiting Scientist, Friday Harbor Laboratories, University of Washington (2012-present);  Assistant Professor, Department of Biology, College of Charleston (2010-2016); Postdoctoral Associate, Department of Biological Sciences, Clemson University (2009-2010); Part-time Faculty, Department of Physical Therapy, Chapman University (2008).

SICB Activities: Divisional Secretary for DVM (2015-2018); Nominating Committee for DCB (2019-2020); Nominee for secretary of the DCB (2013); Organized “Effective Presentation Skills” workshop (2013); Broadening Participation Committee (2012-2015; 2019-present); Organized the SE Regional DCB/DVM Meetings (2012); Chair and judge for the DVM Best Student Paper Award Committee (2011)

Other Memberships: American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists

Research Interests: I am interested in the mechanics of biomaterials, morphology, and movement. The main theme of my research program investigates how hagfishes implement their jawless feeding apparatuses as proper jaws. Most research activities in my lab involve creating and analyzing 3D anatomical reconstructions of feeding apparatuses, assessing the
material properties and puncture resistance of loose skins in hagfish, and characterizing the 3D kinematics of knotting. I also address biomechanics questions with other organisms like lizards, snakes, guinea fowl, cockroaches, and marine algae.

Goals Statement: I am honored to be nominated as a candidate for Member-at-Large. I have been a SICB member for more than eighteen years. Even though I had little previous experience in research when I first attended SICB, I felt encouraged to share the results from my data without feeling awkward or out-of-place. As a Member-at-Large, I am most excited about
helping SICB continue to be a healthy and supportive venue that promotes intellectual growth and professional development of students and postdocs. I will facilitate SICB’s mission by encouraging participation of a broad spectrum of scholars and placing them in a unifying environment where discoveries can be shared and collaborations can be formed. With my connections to the Broadening Participation Committee and my participation in the Dorothy Skinner Award Program, I will work on furnishing more support for underrepresented minorities, women, and first-generation students. Furthermore, I want to help SICB with its public outreach efforts and help it maintain constructive dialogues with government officials. Thank you for considering my candidacy.

 

Kory M. Evans 

Kory Evans

Current Position: Assistant Professor at Rice University (2020-Present)

Education: B.S. Nova Southeastern University (2013) Ph. D. University of Louisiana Lafayette (2017)

Professional Experience: Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow, Brown University (2019-2020); Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Minnesota (2017-2019)

SICB Activities: Member of SICB for four years. Associate editor for IOB.

Other Memberships: American Society for Ichthyology and Herpetology, Society for the Study of Evolution

Research Interests: Evolution and development of the vertebrate skull. Interface between morphology, ecology, and performance.

Goals Statement: I consider SICB to be one of my home societies. Ever since I attended my first meeting, I have always been impressed by the welcoming and collaborative environment for young researchers and the commitment to diversity and inclusion within the society. I am honored to be nominated to run for Member-at-Large. I will zealously advocate for interdisciplinary collaboration and diversity within the society. Thank you for considering my candidacy.

Spring 2021: Division of Animal Behavior

Best Student Presentation Competition

Zuk Award finalists

Thank you to all of the students who participated in our 2021 Marlene Zuk and Elizabeth Adkins-Regan competitions! With 36 student competitors and 75 judges, much of our division was involved in these competitions. We are proud of this high level of engagement and grateful to all who participated. The Marlene Zuk Best Student Presentation Session was a fantastic focal point for DAB this year, with eight finalists giving excellent oral presentations in a well-attended live session. In addition, many students competed for the Elizabeth Adkins-Regan Award for Best Student Poster throughout this year’s virtual meeting.

 

Elizabeth George, Marlene Zuk Award

The Marlene Zuk Award for best oral presentation went to Elizabeth George for her talk entitled “Uncovering the bidirectional link between testosterone and aggression in a female songbird.” Elizabeth is a PhD candidate in the lab of Dr. Kim Rosvall at Indiana University. Her dissertation focuses on the proximate mechanisms and ultimate outcomes of female aggression in tree swallows, a cavity-nesting songbird species that competes for nest sites. Through her work in the field and lab, she seeks to understand how females respond behaviorally and physiologically to dynamic competitive environments throughout a breeding season, with a particular focus on the role of the steroid hormone testosterone. In the research presented at SICB, Elizabeth showed that aggression and testosterone in female tree swallows were temporally associated, with highest levels early in the breeding season when territories were being established. However, females responding to experimentally increased competition showed intense aggressive behavior but no increase in testosterone.

Joyce Wang, Elizabeth Adkins-Regan Award

The Elizabeth Adkins-Regan Award went to Joyce Wang, for her poster “The neural transcriptomic basis of attaining social dominance status.” Joyce is an undergraduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, majoring in Biology with a concentration in Computational Biology. She has a strong interest in Bioinformatics and has been working on the transcriptomic analysis of phenotypic plasticity with Dr. Hans Hofmann and Dr. Becca Young. In this study of the highly social cichlid fish, Astatotilapia burtoni, Joyce and coauthors investigated gene expression in brain regions associated with social decision making when subordinate males were allowed to ascend to dominant status. Distinct changes in gene expression were identified in association with the behavioral and physiological changes that accompany this change in social status.

Many congratulations to our winners, kudos to all student presenters, and a big round of applause to all of the judges who stepped up to help evaluate the student talks and posters!

 

Message From the Chair

Kendra Sewell, Chair.DAB@sicb.org

A huge thank you to all members who presented at, and participated in, our virtual meeting for 2021! This has been a tough year for everyone and the chance to engage with colleagues was a welcome break. The support that the Division of Animal Behavior provides for students is especially impressive and both our student presentation sessions and mentoring program were highlights of our meeting. I want to give a few shout outs to people who made this happen…

Rindy Anderson, organizer of DAB Mentoring Program
  • Our DAB Mentoring Program was organized by Dr. Rindy Anderson and served over 60 people. We are looking forward to an in-person version for 2022 so please think about participating or reaching out to help organize.
  • Our Student Talk and Poster Sessions were supported by viewers and judges who volunteered their time to support early career folks. These sessions are a great opportunity to highlight student work so please encourage students to participate and attend these sessions in future.
  • DAB now has a twitter handle (@SICB_DAB)! Thanks to Brett Hodinka, Matthew LeFauve, and Sarah Manka-Worthington taking on a social media campaign for us. Please follow the work they are highlighting!

This will be my last year as SICB DAB Chair – please vote in this upcoming election and please consider serving our division in the future. This is a great group of people within a society that emphasizes student and early career development, support of diversity, and really cool science. If you see something that can be improved please reach out, step up, and join us!

 

Message from the Program Officer

Kathleen Lynch, DPO.DAB@sicb.org

Breakout room at the DAB Social, SICB 2021

Thank you to all the presenters, attendees and volunteers that made this year’s virtual SICB meeting a great success. The virtual format paired with a prolonged timeframe was a wonderful way to view talks without too much screen time in a single day. There were so many benefits to this approach that it has sparked a conversation on how to keep those benefits as we move forward. Also, DAB had many submissions for the student presentation competitions this year and all the selected student talks in this session knocked it out of the park.

 

The symposia that DAB selected for sponsorship in 2022 are listed below.

  • Ecoimmunology: What unconventional organisms tell us after two decades. Organizers: Vania Assis and Stefanny Monteiro
  • Morphology and evolution of female copulatory morphology in Amniotes. Organizers: Patty Brennan and Günter Wagner
  • Evolutionary conservation and diversity in a key vertebrate behavior: “Walking” as a model system. Organizers: Haley Amplo, Alice Gibb and Sandy Kawano
  • Best practices for bioinspired design education, research and product development. Organizers: Marianne Alleyne, Aimy Wissa, Andrew Suarez and William Barley
  • Phenological plasticity: From molecular mechanisms to ecological and evolutionary implications. Organizers: Cory Williams and Lise Aubry

While we received many symposia proposals, we are always looking for more ideas. It is never too soon to contact me with your symposium ideas or if you have any questions about organizing a symposium. DAB would also like to continue co-sponsoring symposia that bridge complementary fields of research and that reflect the integrative qualities of our animal behavior studies. Contact me if you are considering becoming a symposium organizer and I will help you navigate the process and offer ideas to look for financial support. Once again, thanks to all presenters and attendees.

We hope to see you face-to-face at SICB soon!

 

Message from the Secretary

Allison Welch, Secretary.DAB@sicb.org

First, I’d like to express sincere gratitude to our outgoing DAB Secretary, the amazing Erica Westerman. Erica has done a wonderful job organizing the Zuk and Adkins-Regan Best Student Presentation competitions, enhancing DAB communications, and helping guide our division with her cheerful and sagacious contributions to the DAB executive committee. Erica has also gone above and beyond in working with me to help ensure a smooth transition. Thank you, Erica, for your dedicated service to DAB!

DAB highlights from SICB 2021 – Along with the fantastic lineup of symposia, plenary lectures, and contributed sessions, our meeting highlights included the Best Student Presentation competitions, the DAB members meeting and social, and the second year of our mentoring program. Thank you to everyone who took part in these events. We value your engagement in DAB, and we warmly welcome all DAB members to participate in the future!

Keeping up with DAB – To complement our twice-yearly newsletter, DAB is stepping up our engagement on social media. Our new twitter team, made up of Brett Hodinka, Matthew LeFauve, and Sarah Manka-Worthington, is working hard to boost our social media presence and bring SICB DAB content to your feed. Brett Hodinka is a Ph.D. student at Simon Fraser University studying avian behavior, physiology, and life history. Sarah Manka-Worthington is a Ph.D. student at Indiana State University studying stress physiology, behavior, and signals in lizards. Matt LeFauve is a Ph.D. student at George Washington University studying sensory ecology, behavior, and neural anatomy in an invasive fish.

DAB Social Media Team: Brett Hodinka, Sarah Manka-Worthington, Matt LeFauve

Follow @SICB_DAB on twitter or join SICB Division of Animal Behavior on Facebook. Please reach out to me at Secretary.DAB@sicb.org if you have an announcement or opportunity to share with our members or if you have questions or suggestions about anything DAB-related.

ABS 2021 – The 2021 Animal Behavior Society annual meeting will be August 3-6 and will be virtual again this year. ABS is DAB’s sibling organization, and this summer’s virtual ABS meeting is a great opportunity to immerse yourself in behavioral research and connect with animal behavior colleagues without the hassle and expense of travel.

Please vote in the upcoming SICB Election – All SICB members, including students, are encouraged to vote in the upcoming SICB election. In addition to candidates for Society-wide positions, you will be able to vote on DAB Chair, and later this summer, on a change to the DAB Bylaws. You can read more below about the DAB Chair candidate below; the SICB-wide newsletter contains candidate biographies for Society-wide positions.

 

Message from the Student/Postdoctoral Affairs Committee Representative

Conner Philson, cphilson [at] ucla.edu

Conner Philson

I’m excited to join the DAB team as the new Student/Post-Doctoral Affairs Committee (SPDAC) Representative! A huge shoutout to outgoing representative Dr. Sydney Hope for her service these past three years. Thank you, Sydney!

This year’s virtual SICB was a wild success. One of many SPDAC highlights was each of our division’s representatives hosting an open office hour used to help address comments, questions, and concerns or just as a place to chat.

As we all hope to safely gather in person again soon at SICB 2022 in Phoenix, SPDAC is always looking for new ways to help our community! If you have an idea for SPDAC or DAB, please never hesitate to reach out to me: cphilson (at) ucla.edu. We are always looking for feedback on our continuing programs and for new ideas. Whether you have a specific seminar topic or some jumbled thoughts, we want to hear them!

 

Candidate for Chair

Avery Russell

Avery Russell

Education: B.S. Cornell University, Entomology and Plant Science (2007); Ph.D. University of Arizona, Insect Science, Neuroscience minor (2016)

Professional Experience: Postdoctoral PEEP Fellow, Ecology and Evolution, University of Pittsburgh (2017-2019); Assistant Professor, Department of Biology, Missouri State University (MSU) (2019-present)

SICB Activities: Member since 2014; Invited talk 2021, contributed presentations 2015-2017

Other Memberships: Society for the Study of Evolution; International Commission for Plant-Pollinator Relationships; Animal Behavior Society; Sigma Xi; International Society for Behavioral Ecology; Entomological Society of America; International Congress for Neuroethology

Research Interests: I am a behavioral and evolutionary ecologist interested in how flexibility in foraging behavior shapes the ecology and evolution of plant-animal-microbial interactions. The lab’s work focuses on how plant-pollinator reciprocal exploitation shapes foraging behavior, floral traits, and/or microbial associates.

Goals Statement: The diversity of SICB attendee research and careers has made SICB an extremely welcoming venue for me and my students. As a behavioral ecologist working across evolutionary biology, microbiology, and pollination biology, interdisciplinary research is my passion. I have also greatly appreciated and benefitted from SICB’s commitment to early career researchers. If I am elected DAB Chair, I will work with the other DAB officers, members, and the SICB Broadening Participation Committee, to facilitate opportunities for early career researchers (e.g., symposia and workshops to advance their careers), promote interdisciplinary research, and to interrogate our current practices and continue to build a culture of (and funding for) justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in DAB and SICB. I have substantial experience with DEI initiatives across multiple institutions. For instance, I am a member of the Animal Behavior Society (ABS) diversity committee and at MSU, the Provost Diversity Council, the CNAS Diversity Committee, the Inclusive Admissions Committee, and the Ad Hoc Faculty Handbook Revision Committee (2020-present), and a co-organizer of the ABS Cultural Competency Workshop (2019, 2020) and ABS Inclusive Mentoring Workshop (2021). I also have conference organizing experience and was an organizing committee member and co-chair of the scientific programming committee of the Three Rivers Evolution Event at the University of Pittsburgh, a regional conference serving 168 and 193 attendees from 45 and 35 institutions, giving 109 and 147 presentations in 2017 and 2018, respectively. While I do not have experience in SICB leadership positions, I believe my strong interdisciplinary research background and demonstrated commitment to inclusive practice and justice in mentoring, teaching, and professional service are a solid foundation for service as DAB Chair.

Spring 2021: Division of Comparative Biomechanics

Message from the Chair

John Long, chair.dcb@sicb.org

With the end of this year’s remote annual meeting, we say, “Farewell and welcome!”  Leaving us in her role as Chair of the Division is Stacey Combes, who gave us excellent leadership for two years.  Please join me in thanking her.  Fortunately for us, she can’t be entirely free of DCB yet:  she will continue to advise us as the Past Chair. Joining the Division’s Executive Committee is the Chair-Elect, Brooke Flammang, winner of the 2020 election for that position. Welcome! After observing from the wings, she will take the reins in two years.

With elections in mind, this Spring we’ll elect a new divisional Program Officer and Secretary. Many thanks to our Nominating Committee, David Hu (chair), Kakani Katija, and Marianne Porter. They considered self-nominations – which are always encouraged – and also generated a separate list of nominees from the DCB membership list. We are very grateful to the following candidates for accepting the nomination: Mason Dean and Jimmy Liao for Program Officer; Maria Laura Habegger and Floris van Breugel for Secretary. Please read their biographies, below.

Both positions are extremely important, with much hidden work behind the scenes. As indicated in our divisional bylaws, the main job of the Program Officer is to “arrange for the programs” of the division. Sounds simple until you have to solve that puzzle at the same time that all the other divisional program officers are solving theirs while considering available rooms, proximity to related talks, and the always vexing overlap of sessions. The main job of the Secretary is, frankly, to keep the Division running. They organize communications, produce and edit the newsletter, and manage nomination committees and nominees. This is critical service to our division and we thank the candidates for standing for election.

We are seeking volunteers to form this year’s Gans Award Nomination Committee. With nominations due usually in mid-August, the work of the committee takes place shortly thereafter. Please email me if you are interested in either being on the committee, nominating someone, or self-nominating. Details about the award and nomination process are found here.

Thanks to all members for pulling together to make the SICB 2021 Annual Meeting work.  I want to give a special thanks to Armita Manafzadeh, our Student and Postdoctoral Representative, who innovated and organized to make our two joint DCB-DVM Socials a great success. Also, Matt McHenry, our Program Officer, worked the scheduling puzzle I mentioned, above, under very fluid conditions throughout the fall. Finally, a personal thanks to our Secretary, Emily Kane, for a steady hand on the tiller, keeping us on course in the face of headwinds and rough seas.

Carl Gans Award: Keynote Address at SICB 2021

Dr. Martha Muñoz, winner of the 2021 Carl Gans Award, gave the keynote address, ‘Constraint’, a Double-edged Sword for Evolution.  A faculty member at Yale University (www.marthamunoz.com/), Dr. Muñoz’s work is a great example of the approach to biomechanics that Dr. Gans championed:  comparative, ecological, and evolutionary.

Congrats to Dr. Muñoz, and thanks to Twitter user Hugo A. Benítez, @HugoBenitezd, for capturing this screenshot featuring both Martha (right) and DCB chair Stacey Combes (left).

Stacey Combes and Martha Munoz during Gans Lecture, SICB 2021

Each year, DCB evaluates applications for the Carl Gans Award, which was established to recognize Carl Gans’ contributions to animal morphology, biomechanics, and functional biology. The Gans Award is given to (1) an outstanding young investigator in the field of comparative biomechanics and/or (2) an investigator at any career stage for a significant contribution to the literature of comparative biomechanics published in the preceding five calendar years.

The awardee receives a commemorative plaque at SICB, reimbursement for travel expenses to the meeting, and the honor of joining the ranks of past Carl Gans Awardees, such as Martha Muñoz, Alyssa Stark, Misty Paig-Tran, Brooke Flammang, Sharlene Santana, Chris Clark, and Eric Tytell.  We would love to see more members of our growing, vibrant DCB community included in the nominee pool for this award, so please think about submitting an application or nominating one of your colleagues! Additional details about the Gans award are available at: http://sicb.org/membership/awards.php3#gans.

Congratulations to the DCB Best Student Presentation Award winner!

Anthony Lapsansky

The best student presentation competition offered a remarkable glimpse into the up-and-coming research of the graduate students in our division. Finalists were chosen from a larger pool of students who submitted extended abstracts in September, and all of the finalists presented fascinating work. We would like to thank the DCB BSP committee for their impeccable organization and the time they dedicated to this year’s competition.  We are already looking forward to hearing from next year’s new talent.

This year’s winner of The Mimi A. R. Koehl and Stephen A. Wainwright Award for the Best Student Talk in Biomechanics was Anthony Lapsansky from the University of Montana, with his talk titled: Aquatic locomotion in non-aquatic birds and the secondary evolution of subsurface swimming.

 

Tribute to Steve Wainwright

Many members of DCB were deeply saddened to hear of Steve Wainwright’s passing last year. Mark Westneat and I have compiled a tribute to Steve, with many current DCB members contributing. Please click here to read about Steve’s impact on so many of us.

If you are interested in honoring Steve by supporting graduate students through SICB’s Grants-in-Aid of Research (GIAR) program,  we invite you to contribute to the Stephen Wainwright named fund.

 

Message from the Program Officer

Matt McHenry dpo.dcb@sicb.org

Despite the many challenges faced by our membership over the past year, the SICB leadership achieved a major feat by organizing an annual meeting with more registrations than any in recent years prior. As is typical of our meetings, DCB and DVM played a disproportionately large role in the symposia and contributed sessions. About one-fifth of contributed talks were within session organized by our divisions and we sponsored half of the symposia.

SICB 2021 looked a little different this year, but the new format made it one of our most accessible meetings – even pets had a chance to join! Image by Twitter user Ben Tidswell, @BenKTidswell, who posted: “I wasn’t the only one interested in Anthony Lapsansky’s talk about the aquatic locomotion of birds!”.

Ben Tidswell’s view of Anthony Lapsansky’s talk

Symposia

Symposia are vital to the division and the society in general. They serve to highlight major themes in our field, provide perspectives from outside the society, and serve as a basis for influential published volumes of Integrative and Comparative Biology (ICB). Through a strong history of divisional leadership, we are on a streak of supporting excellent symposia. The symposium talks at the virtual meeting covered an impressive diversity of topics, including how to teach with experiential learning, the integrative biology of dogs, the diversity of biological adhesives, the fluid-structure interactions of swimming appendages, and the mechanics of behavior.

We are on track to continue supporting diverse and interesting symposia at the upcoming meeting in Phoenix. Here are the topics that DCB is sponsoring for SICB 2022:

  1. Lesser known transitions: organismal form and function across abiotic gradients. Organizers: Charlotte Easterling, Mary Kate O’Donnell, & Matthew Kolmann
  2. Open source solutions in experimental design. Organizers: Kirk Onthank & Richelle Tanner
  3. Causal mechanisms of interspecific metabolic scaling patterns. Organizers: Jon Harrison & Meghan Duell
  4. Evolutionary conservation and diversity in a key vertebrate behavior: “walking” as a model system. Organizers: Haley Amplo, Alice Gibb, & Sandy Kawano
  5. Best practices for bioinspired design education, research and product development. Organizers: Marianne Alleyne, Aimy Wissa, Andrew Suarez, & William Barley.
  6. Reciprocal illumination between ecology and biomechanics: evolution, integration, and constraint. Organizers: Lara Ferry & Tim Higham.

Maintaining strong DCB symposia depends on the creative energy of our members. As a former organizer myself, I can say that it is highly rewarding to gather a group of speakers whom you admire and to later see that work in a published volume of ICB. So, please consider organizing a symposium for SICB 2023 in Austin, TX. The deadline for a symposium proposal will be in August, though you will want to start planning soon.  If you have some potential ideas, then do not hesitate to contact me with your thoughts (dpo.dcb@sicb.org). Here are some guidelines for what’s involved when organizing a symposium: https://tinyurl.com/tkudwnr.

Once SICB members have submitted their symposium ideas, then I will be involved with deciding which ones to approve and grant DCB support. Please help guide me through this process by taking about one minute to fill out the following survey, which indicates the kind of symposium that you would like to attend or maybe organize yourself:  https://forms.gle/WYgWamNE9ACLrfBL6

Contributed presentations

The large numbers of DVM/DCB contributions offer an embarrassment of riches for those of us who enjoy a variety of topics related to biomechanics. Nonetheless, I think we still have room for growth and I would therefore recommend that we all encourage abstract submission by biologists and engineers who have either gotten out of the habit of attending or would enjoy an introduction to our community.

You can help yourself get assigned to a session with speakers who share your interests. When you submit an abstract for the meeting, select your primary topic under the general subject of Category B: ‘Morphology and Biomechanics’. Presentations under that classification should cross my desk when we put the program together.

Finally, I have to offer my immense gratitude to Jake Socha, the society Program Officer (and DCB member) for all of his hard work in reorganizing how we run a meeting for the virtual format. I also was greatly helped by Mason Dean, the DPO for DVM, who did much of the organizing the DCB and DVM sessions. My job was largely facilitated by Jake and Mason’s hard work.

 

Message from the Secretary

Emily Kane secretary.dcb@sicb.org 

Just a few quick updates from me:

Member’s Meeting minutes

Please review our 2021 Member’s Meeting minutes (here). We will vote on their approval at the 2022 Member’s Meeting next year, so let me know if you have any questions or concerns about them.

Elections

This Spring we are electing a new Program Officer and Secretary of the Division of Comparative Biomechanics, who will each serve from January 2022 through the end of the annual meeting in January 2023. You can read each candidates’ biography at the end of this newsletter. We thank the candidates for their willingness to serve, as well as the Nominating Committee (Drs. David Hu, Kakani Katija, and Marianne Porter) for helping us assemble such a stellar list of candidates! We especially encourage student and post-doc members to vote – start shaping the future of your society now! Note that you do NOT need to have already paid your 2021 dues to vote – having attended the 2021 virtual meeting (or being a member in 2020) qualifies you to vote in the spring 2021 elections.

We need volunteers!

You don’t have to be a divisional officer to contribute to DCB! We will be soliciting volunteers to serve on the following committees in 2021. Volunteers should be DCB members with full status.

  • 2022 Gans Award Committee: Consider the diverse needs and representation of our members to suggest nominations for potential candidates. While anyone can nominate candidates, the committee will be responsible for ensuring the candidates are representative of our members and will nominate additional candidates if necessary. The committee will also judge applications and decide an awardee. TIMELINE: Aug-Sep 2022
  • 2022 Election Nominating Committee: Consider the diverse needs and representation of our members to suggest nominations for the upcoming Chair-Elect election. While anyone can nominate candidates, the committee will be responsible for ensuring the candidates are representative of our members and will nominate additional candidates if necessary. The committee will narrow the nominations to 2-3 candidates. TIMELINE: Chair needed by October 2021, additional members needed by end of year, nominations chosen and nominee acceptance by end of January 2022 at the latest.

National Biomechanics Day

National Biomechanics Day is a world-wide celebration of all things Biomechanics for high school students and teachers. This is a great opportunity to showcase comparative biomechanics as a fun and engaging field of study and a potential career pathway for students. The official date was April 7, 2021, but events can be held any spring or early summer day that works best for you. If you plan on hosting an event, you are asked to register your lab, which can be done here. If you do host or participate in an event, let DCB know! We love to highlight our members!

Steven Vogel Young Investigator Award

The Bioinspiration & Biomimetics journal began the Steve Vogel Young Investigator Award in 2017 to recognize the contributions of early career researchers (within 10 years of PhD) in the fields of biomechanics and biomimetics. Consider nominating colleagues (self-nominations are excluded), especially those who have not yet received this type of recognition for their work. The deadline for nominations is May 31, 2021.

Members in the Media!

Coruscans respirometry (Image: A. Rico-Guevara)

DCB member Dr. Alejandro Rico-Guevara (University of Washington, Seattle, twitter: @ecophysicslab) recently had his work on hummingbird respirometry featured in the Netflix series Alien Worlds (Episode 3, Eden)!

 

Message from the Student and Postdoctoral Representative:

Armita Manafzadeh armita@brown.edu

It was great to see so many of you at the virtual annual meeting!

As always — students and postdocs, please feel free to contact me by email or Twitter (@armanafzadeh) with your suggestions, comments, concerns, or SICB-related feedback, and I’ll be happy to pass them along to John, Matt, and Emily. I am happy to anonymize your feedback if you’d like.

In addition to my work with our students and postdocs, I also run our joint DCB/DVM Twitter account (@SICB_DCB_DVM) and our Facebook group. Please tag @SICB_DCB_DVM in any tweets you’d like me to signal boost — but if you’re not on social media, I’m still happy to share your announcements with our members who are! Our social media channels can be a great place to advertise open positions, share your latest publications, or seek help from the community. Feel free to email me with anything you’d like me to post.

Finally, I run a ~biweekly Twitter #featureFriday series to highlight our wonderful members! This is an easy way to make others in the community aware of you and your work, especially for our early career members. If you’re interested in being featured, please fill out my survey at tinyurl.com/dcbdvmsurvey. PIs, please encourage your students/postdocs to show themselves off!

I’m looking forward to seeing you all again (hopefully in person) soon!

 

Candidates for Program Officer

Mason Dean 

Mason Dean

Current Position:  Asst. Professor, Department of Zoology, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland;  Guest Scientist, Department of Biomaterials, Max Planck Institute of Colloids & Interfaces, Germany; Associate Investigator, Matters of Activity: Image Space Material, Excellence Cluster of Humboldt University Berlin, Germany

Education: Ph.D., Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, UC Irvine (2009; Advisor: Adam Summers); M.S., Zoology, University of South Florida (2003; Advisor: Philip Motta); A.B., Biology w/ Marine Biology concentration, Duke University (2007; Advisor: Richard Forward)

Professional Experience: Following a Humboldt Post-doctoral Fellowship in Germany at the Max Planck Institute, I established a workgroup there, first funded by a Human Frontier Science Program grant, then by the Max Planck Society. After working in Germany for 11 years, I have recently started a workgroup in the Department of Zoology at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Relevant to the DPO position, I’ve served as DPO for DVM, have organized seven externally-funded symposia in disparate fields (e.g. biomaterials, feeding mechanics, and biomineralization), and co-founded an international conference on Comparative Cartilage Biology in 2019.

SICB Activities: Full Member; regular attendee of SICB since 1999; DVM Program officer (2019-2021); DVM Nominating Committee member (2007-10, 2017); co-organizer of two symposia (2009, 2019); session leader and BSP judge (since 2002); Dwight D. Davis presentation award winner as a student

Other Memberships: Society of Experimental Biology (SEB), European Calcified Tissue Society (ECTS), German Zoological Society (DZG)

Research Interests: Collaborative approaches integrating science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics

Goals statement: I’d be excited to give back to DCB as DPO — I’ve been a member of DCB for years and have gotten so much from its science and the friendships I’ve built here. I’m just finishing a tenure as DVM’s DPO: two years is just enough time to learn how to keep the ship afloat, but not quite enough to make real change. With Phil and Matt (previous and current DCB DPOs), I’ve been working to streamline and document the DPO’s duties, to reduce the scramble when a new DPO starts and allow more focus on moving science and mentorship forward. I want to keep pushing divisional and disciplinary boundaries by actively soliciting cutting-edge and diverse symposia, particularly organized by (and including) young-career scientists. I also love to help the division strengthen its ties to varied international societies (e.g. SEB, ECTS) — this will grow DCB and the society’s journal, while also building bridges to other fields interested in biomechanics (engineering, materials science, robotics). Being forward-thinking and open will keep us aware of relevant, state-of-the-art work in other disciplines, while opening communication for novel collaborations and networking/training opportunities for DCB students.

 

Jimmy Liao

Jimmy Liao

Current Position: Associate Professor of Biology, University of Florida and The Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience.

Education: Ph.D. Biology, Harvard University (2004), M.A. Biology, Harvard University (2003), B.A. Biology magna cum laude, Wesleyan University (1996).

Professional Experience: Assistant/Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Florida/The Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience, Affiliate Professor, J. Crayton Pruitt Family of Biomedical Engineering, Affiliate Assistant Curator of Ichthyology, Florida Museum of Natural History (2009-present); NIH NRSA Postdoctoral Fellow, Dept. of Neurobiology and Behavior, Cornell University (2004-2007); Visiting Research Faculty, Undergraduate and Graduate Tropical Field Biology, Organization for Tropical Studies (2000-2012).

SICB Activities: Member since 1998. Judge, student awards in Divisions of Comparative Biomechanics, Vertebrate Morphology, and Neurobiology (2005-2014). Public Affairs Committee (2017-2020).

Other Memberships: Society for Experimental Biology, American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, International Society for Neuroethology, Society for Neuroscience.

Research Interests: My research looks through the lens of biomechanics and neuroscience to better understand fish behavior across multiple levels of organization, from single neurons to the organism. Current approaches include 1) using zebrafish and cavefish to understand the interactions between sensory and motor function, and 2) combining brain and muscle recordings in virtual reality arenas to investigate the role of perception on predator-prey responses, and 3) leveraging field tagging technologies to understand the diversity and magnitude of natural behaviors.

Goals Statement: I’m excited to work with other divisional Program Officers to organize an inclusive cross-section of talks and poster for the annual meeting. As a member of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee at my home institution, one of my priorities is to enable scientists from non-traditional backgrounds to bring in their perspectives to expand the intellectual reach of comparative biomechanics. To paraphrase a Taiwanese saying, “the ocean only gets so big because it accepts all sources of water.”

 

Candidates for Secretary

Maria Laura Habegger

Laura Habegger

Current Position: Assistant Professor, Biology Department at the University of North Florida

Education: BS in Aquatic Biology (Universidad de Buenos Aires), MS and PhD in Biology (University of South Florida)

Professional Experience: 2015-2016: Ichthyology Collection Manager, Florida Fish and Wildlife Research Institute (FWRI); 2015-2016: Adjunct instructor (USF); 2016- 2019: Assistant Professor (Florida Southern College); 2019-present: Assistant Professor (University of North Florida)

SICB Activities: Active member (presented my research most years since 2008)

Other Memberships: ICVM and JMIH

Research Interests: Functional morphology and feeding biomechanics in fishes

Goals Statement: My goals as secretary for the Division of Comparative Biomechanics at SICB are tightly related to my deep desire to give back to this prestigious association. As an international graduate student (Latina) SICB has opened its doors for me and supported my research immensely giving me each January an energizing stimulus that boosted my progress and shaped my research interests. The high quality and truly interdisciplinary level of research shown at SICB rises every year and I want to be an active part of this ever-growing outstanding intellectual chain. During my service I will be honored to contribute to the growth of knowledge and diversity of this one of a kind community of broad-minded scientists where we all share SICB’s common goal to foster research and education about all living organisms.

 

Floris van Breugel 

Floris van Breugel

Current Position: Assistant Professor, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering and Programs for Integrative Neuroscience and Ecology & Evolution, University of Nevada, Reno.

Education: PhD in Control and Dynamical Systems, Caltech (2014; Advisor: Michael Dickinson). BS in Biological Engineering, Cornell University.

Professional Experience: Assistant Professor, University of Nevada – Reno (2019-present), Postdoctoral fellow in Biology and Data Science, University of Washington (2017-2019; Advisors: Jeff Riffell, Nathan Kutz), Postdoctoral Fellow in Biology, Caltech (2015-2017; Advisor: Michael Dickinson).

SICB Activities: Member and regular attendee since 2012.

Other Memberships: American Physical Society, co-organized workshop on Robotics-Inspired-Biology at IROS 2020

Research Interests: I study how animal movement and sensory processing are coupled, and how their coevolution is shaped by ecology. I am especially interested in how insects integrate different types of sensory information over time to solve complex problems in dynamic environments, like odor plume tracking, using flies and robots as model systems. These are inherently integrative research questions, and my lab takes an interdisciplinary approach that brings together biomechanics, behavior, neurobiology, and robotics.

Goals Statement: The process of starting a lab that straddles several departments and programs in the midst of a global pandemic has made it clear to me how important it is to have a supportive community of peers and colleagues with similar academic interests. Regular sharing of ideas within this community is needed for both academic and emotional support. SICB, and in particular DCB, has been the most constant and supportive community in my own academic career, and my experience over the past two years has given me the motivation to start giving back. As Secretary, I will continue with the efforts of my predecessors to keep our unique community strong and welcoming. In particular, I will use the newsletter and other social media avenues as an opportunity to help students, postdocs, early-career, and established faculty make connections that extend beyond our annual meeting by encouraging the organization and advertising of opportunities for seminars, regional gatherings, and workshops related to comparative biomechanics throughout the year.

Spring 2021: Division of Comparative Endocrinology

Message from the Chair

Kathleen Hunt, chair.dce@sicb.org

I hope you were all able to attend the SICB virtual meeting this year. I think opinion is universal that despite the new and unfamiliar format, the virtual format was a great success. Talks were well attended, and I was truly impressed with the quality of the research and the polished nature of the presentations. Though we all missed getting to interact with each other in person, we enjoyed many features of the new format, such as the ability to watch talks that we might otherwise have had to miss, and increased participation from international students and speakers. We hope to continue some elements of the new format in the future.

Highlights of the 2021 meeting for DCE include: 

Ela Hau with Bern Award plaque

Bern Lecture. Our Bern lecturer this year was Prof. Dr. Michael Hau, who gave a wonderful, and very well-attended, virtual talk titled, “Hormone-mediated plasticity: is there an optimal hormonal phenotype?” I found it a wonderful discussion of possible hormonal phenotypes and how hormonal responses interact with fitness, with particularly fascinating insights about reaction norms, different types of hormone-trait relationships, and the role of plasticity. However, we all terribly missed the opportunity to meet with Ela in person – hopefully we will all be able to see each other again in the near future.

Best Student Presentations. Our two annual competitions for Best Student Talk and Best Student Poster were particularly intense this year. All divisions kicked off the meeting on day 1 with best student talk sessions, and all were very well attended; the DCE poster competition then had extended judging over several more weeks to allow all of our volunteer judges the time to meet with multiple students. In total, 15 students participated in these two DCE competitions. The winner of the Aubrey Gorbman Best Student Oral Presentation was Grascen Shidemantle, and the winner of the Lynn Riddiford Best Student Poster was Carley Lowe. Congratulations to both students for their excellent research and fine presentations! Special thanks to all of our hardworking volunteer judges as well.

Symposia. DCE co-sponsored 4 symposia at the 2021 meeting: Blinded By The LightBiology Beyond The ClassroomSending And Receiving Signals, and Manakin Genomics. All of these symposia reached across division lines and brought together a great mix of speakers from different fields of biology. Start thinking about symposia for 2023! (Remember, symposia must be planned more than a year in advance.)

Other meeting activities. DCE Student/Post-doc Representative Carla Madelaire once again organized the “(Virtual) Lunch With A Comparative Endocrinologist” mentor/mentee matching event, as well as our annual DCE Data Blitz social media effort for this year’s meeting. Impressively, the Data Blitz had even greater participation this year than last year, and both events were a great success. Our thanks to Carla for continuing these two events focused on enhancing the experience of DCE students and postdocs.

Changes in DCE officers. At the end of this year’s extended meeting, Brian Walker and Timothy Greives stepped down as DCE Program Officer and DCE Secretary, respectively. Sara O’Brien is DCE’s new Program Officer and Christine Lattin is DCE’s new Secretary (while I, Kathleen Hunt, continue as DCE Chair for one more year). We are very grateful to Brian and Tim for their tireless efforts, particularly this year when stress was high, workloads just as high, and everything so much more complicated than usual. I have to extend special thanks to Brian for staying on as Program Officer a year longer than he originally expected (due to DCE’s recent vote to extend the term of his position) — especially given that the extra year turned out to involve organizing a new and complex virtual meeting!

Upcoming elections. This summer, DCE members will vote to elect a new DCE Chair-Elect and a new DCE Secretary-Elect. Please watch your email for announcements about the election, and vote when election time rolls around – we need your input!

Next Student/Postdoc Representative. We are also searching for the next Student/Postdoctoral Representative to succeed Carla Madelaire, who will step down at the end of the Phoenix, AZ meeting in January 2022. This is not an elected position, so graduate students and postdocs can self-nominate simply by sending a letter of interest to the DCE Chair (me) at the email address above.

Other business. When the pandemic hit, DCE officers were just about to launch surveys and discussions regarding possible rebranding or re-naming of DCE, including an associated discussion of the annual $10 fee charged to DCE members (the fee is a requirement of DCE’s membership in the International Federation of Comparative Endocrinology Societies). Due to the pandemic and highly increased workloads and stress, we had to postpone these discussions. However, we hope to return to these issues later this year – please stay tuned. In the meantime, if any of you have thoughts on the future of DCE and what trajectory you would like DCE to take, please contact me or any of the DCE officers. This is your division, and we want to make it work for you, and make sure our division has a vibrant future ahead!

FUTURE MEETINGS. We are dearly hoping to be able to convene in person in January 2022 for the Phoenix meeting. This means that now is the time to think about Bern speakers for Phoenix. The Bern nomination committee has an existing list of nominees, but you can still add to the list. And yes, you can self-nominate! Contact any DCE officer for details. We also wish to encourage symposium ideas for Austin in 2023. We would particularly like to encourage symposia that reach across SICB division lines, or that cover taxa or topics not being studied by current DCE leadership. Symposia are a great opportunity to pull together speakers who might not otherwise interact with each other – and remember, all SICB symposia result in publications in the SICB journal Integrative and Comparative Biology. Contact any DCE officer if you have symposium ideas.

I wish you all a safe and healthy 2021, and hope we will all get to see each other again, fully vaccinated, in Phoenix next year!

In memory of Dr. Richard Jones. We are saddened to relay the news that long-time ASZ/SICB and DCE member Dr. Richard E. Jones, 80, passed away on February 23, 2021, after a six-month battle with dementia.  A celebration of Dr. Jones’ life will be conducted sometime after COVID-19 restrictions are lifted. If any DCE member should wish to contact Dr. Jones’ family, please get in touch with the DCE chair (chair.dce@sicb.org) for the family’s contact information.

 

Remembering Dr. Richard Evan Jones

David O. Norris

 Professor Richard Evan Jones, May 13, 1940-February 23, 2021

Dick Jones was born in California and appropriately received his BA, MA, and PhD in comparative endocrinology at the University of California, Berkeley, under the direction of Professor Howard Bern in 1968.  After a short stint at the Hershey Medical School in Pennsylvania, Dick joined the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1970 as an Assistant Professor of Biology where he taught Human Anatomy and Vertebrate Reproduction until his retirement in 1998.  He was then elected Professor Emeritus by the Department of Environmental, Population and Organismic Biology (currently the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology). Dick’s dream as a new professor was to do research in comparative endocrinology and surround himself with graduate students. And he succeeded in both. His goal in both teaching and research was to get students to think “outside the box” and formulate hypotheses to explain things in the natural world and design sound experiments to test those hypotheses. He received an “Excellence in Teaching Award” from the College of Arts and Sciences for his efforts. Dick was happiest when he had made a new hypothesis himself and could test it with innovative experimental designs.  And he did this not only in science but in his favorite avocation, fly fishing. During his career he mentored many graduate students and numerous undergraduate students in his Laboratory of Comparative Reproduction. He published more than 150 scientific journal articles and book chapters dealing with fishes, amphibians, reptiles, and birds and two important scientific books (RE Jones 1978, The Ovary (Plenum Press) and Hormones and Reproduction in Fishes, Amphibians, and Reptiles (Norris DO and RE Jones, 1987, Plenum Press, still being cited today).  Additionally, he wrote a successful textbook Human Reproduction (RE Jones and KH Lopez, 4th edition, Academic Press, 2013).  His research in lizard gynecology was supported by numerous grants from NIH. During his academic career Dick was an active member of the Division of Comparative Endocrinology of the American Society of Zoology (ASZ) that later became the Society for Integrative and Comparative Endocrinology (SICB).  He was a valuable contributor to the Western Regional Conferences on Comparative Endocrinology that met regularly from 1964-2006.

Dick died at the age of 80 after a six-month battle with dementia. Unfortunately, he did not go as he had often wished: face-down in a trout stream with a fish on his line.  He is survived by his devoted wife, Betty, and four sons: Christopher Jones, Peter Jones, Ryan Hibberd and Evan Jones.  His wry humor and quick wit as well as his scientific acumen are deeply missed by all who knew him.

 

Message from the Program Officer

Sara O’Brien. DPO.DCE@sicb.org

Here’s hoping this finds you and yours safe and healthy. #SICB2021 was a much different experience than usual due to the ongoing pandemic. While we have always prided ourselves on the welcoming environment the annual SICB conference provides – the ability to catch up with colleagues and friends, to provide students with a safe and encouraging space to present their work, often for the first time – this year we found ourselves navigating a virtual conference.

I want to offer a BIG thanks to all who attended the various real time virtual meeting components from January through February. Thank you also to those who watched presentations and offered kind, constructive, and critical feedback to presenters asynchronously. The common theme that remained through this year’s conference was the excellent quality of both talks and posters! Hopefully we will be able to convene and catch up with each other in person next year, but for now a hardy congrats to all presenters and attendees in successfully navigating the new virtual environment.

I would also like to thank my colleague, former advisor, and friend, Dr. Michaela Hau, for giving an enlightening Howard Bern Lecture. Her presentation, “Hormone-mediated phenotypic plasticity: is there an optimal hormonal phenotype?” took a long view and stimulated us all to think about this question in our work going forward.

As mentioned by the Chair, I would also like to congratulate the two winners of the DCE student competitions. The Aubrey Gorbam Best Oral Presentation was awarded to Grascen Shidemantel from Binghamton University, and the Lynn Riddiford Award for Best Student Poster was awarded to Carley Lowe from Northern Arizona University. Many thanks to all of the judges who attended this year’s student talks and visited the posters. Choosing only two winners from all of these excellent presentations was very difficult.

The 2022 SICB Conference in sunny Phoenix, Arizona will be here before we know it. Please check the SICB website and the “Upcoming meetings” tab for more information on the exciting DCE sponsored and co-sponsored symposia. For anyone who is thinking about organizing a symposium for the 2023 meeting in Austin, TX, please note that proposals will be due in August 2021. We look forward to seeing all of your faces in person, and until then, please stay safe and healthy!

 

Message from the Secretary

Christine Lattin, secretary.DCE@sicb.org

 Hi everyone! I am taking over from Tim Grieves, who did a terrific job as DCE Secretary for the last two years. Thanks so much to Tim for his service to the Division!

Even though we couldn’t all be together in Washington, DC, it was still wonderful to see so much exciting new work from DCE Members at the virtual meeting. I spent two months bingeing on all of your cool science, which was frankly pretty awesome to be able to do. I hope you enjoyed the conference too, and here’s hoping that next year we can do it in person.

DCE election season is ahead of us, and this year we have elections for DCE Chair-elect and Secretary-elect. We are very lucky to have two excellent candidates for both open positions. Please read their biographies and candidate statements and take a few moments to cast your ballot when the time comes. Everyone who was a member at the time of the Annual Meeting is eligible to vote.

Don’t forget to keep up with us on social media – DCE has a Facebook group and a Twitter account (@SICB_DCE). Both of these are great ways to stay updated about divisional happenings, including Q&As of endocrinology-related questions and finding out about new publications, job openings, and funding opportunities relevant to DCE members.

If you have any announcements you would like included in the SICB monthly member update, please email me at the address above by the 5th of the month.

Here are some other upcoming meetings you might be interested in attending. Because most these will be virtual, this might be a good opportunity to check out a new conference with minimum fuss and no hotel or travel expenses:

  • Canadian Society of Zoologists Annual Meeting, May 17-21, 2021, virtual format.
  • North American Society for Comparative Endocrinology (NASCE), May 25–27 2021, virtual format.
  • Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology Annual Meeting, June 28–July 2, 2021, virtual format.
  • Evolution Meetings, June 21–25, 2021, virtual format.
  • Society for Experimental Biology, June 28–July 8, 2021, virtual format.
  • Animal Behavior Society Annual Meeting, August 3–6, 2021, virtual format.
  • Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting: November 13-17, Chicago, IL. Abstract submission dates: July 6-15, 2021.

Please stay safe everyone, and best of luck with your personal and professional endeavors this spring and summer!

 

Message from the Student/Post-doctoral Af­fairs Committee Representative

Carla B. Madelaire, carla.madelaire@unlv.edu

Hello students and post-docs, I hope everyone enjoyed this great SICB virtual meeting! Although I missed the in-person interactions, I liked the “Netflix” format because it gave me a chance to see all the presentations I was interested in (something that is usually never possible). Despite the unusual meeting format, we still held our traditional “Lunch with a Comparative Endocrinologist” event virtually. Thank you to the 10 mentors that shared their time and experience and the 29 mentees that participated! I hope this event gave everyone the opportunity to network and enjoy some informal conversation about careers, life, and science.

I would also like to congratulate the winner of the Aubrey Gorbman Award, Grascen Shidemantle, and the winner of the Lynn Riddiford Award, Carley Lowe. All students competing for these awards showed us excellent science and polished presentations, which made the judges’ decisions very difficult. I also want to thank all the students that sent me materials for the Data Blitz. It was much more fun to tweet about science using the awesome videos and images you prepared!

Some other highlights of the 2021 SICB virtual meeting for me were the symposium Sending and Receiving Signals: Endocrine Modulation of Social Communication, where I learned how hormones and social communication interact in different taxa, and the sessions Endocrine Stress I and II, which provided an awesome opportunity to learn about some of the new studies in this area. The meeting also featured some remarkable workshops for students and post-docs, including “Scientific Publishing for Early Career Scientists” organized by Dr. John R. Hutchinson, and “Transferable Skills in Academic and Non-Academic Careers” offered by the Student-Postdoctoral Affairs Committee (SPDAC).

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @SICB_DCE and to join the DCE Facebook group SICB Division of Comparative Endocrinology. Throughout the year, please tag us in your posts and tweets when you share your research, papers, grants, post-doctoral or student opportunities, or other news. I would be happy to feature your research on DCE social media. SICB also provides an amazing list of External Grant & Fellowship Opportunities for Students and Postdocs, which can be accessed through the “For Students” tab on the SICB website. If you have any suggestions that could improve the ways I represent DCE students and post-docs, please contact me at the email address above.

 

Candidates for Chair

Jamie Cornelius 

Jamie Cornelius

Current Position: Assistant Professor of Integrative Biology, Oregon State University.

Education: PhD, Animal Behavior, University of California, Davis (2009).

Professional Experience: Post-doctoral work at the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology (2009-2014). I have since held positions at universities with diverse student communities and teaching or research missions as a part-time Instructor at CSU-Monterey Bay and an Assistant Professor at Eastern Michigan University before landing at Oregon State.

SICB Activities: I have been a continuous SICB member since I started graduate school in 2001. I greatly value SICB’s investment in students, and have participated in numerous student mentorship programs and post-doctoral job panels over the years, and served as a student competition judge in both DCE and DAB every year that I have been eligible.

Other Memberships: I serve on the scientific advisory committee for the International Society of Avian Endocrinology, and frequently participate in the Animal Behavior Society, the American Ornithological Society, and the International Bio-Logging Society meetings.

Research Interests: My research is highly integrative – I investigate behavioral, neuroendocrine, and metabolic responses to unpredictable environmental change. Much of my work uses a nomadic, opportunistic finch, the red crossbill, to investigate a wide array of behavioral and physiological responses to food instability. I use both field and captive approaches and thus have wide appreciation for different approaches to endocrine-related research.

Goals Statement: Serving as the DCE Chair would be my first elected service position in SICB. I would work to promote programs that enrich the student SICB experience and increase the diversity and size of DCE membership. I agree that the membership fee for DCE may be prohibitive for student membership and may stifle growth and diversity within our division, and I support the polling effort of the DCE community about this issue. I also believe that a hybrid conference format can preserve the in-person experience that many of us hold dear, increase participation for those with financial or travel-related barriers, and help to make the SICB conference more sustainable. I would work with members towards a vision of what a successful hybrid format might look like for future SICB meetings. Finally, I would work with the other DCE officers and inspired volunteers to continue the tradition of fun science events at the DCE social, which simultaneously highlight our division’s scientific progress and the vibrant and lively community that is SICB’s DCE.

Greg Demas 

Greg Demas

Current Position: Professor and Chair, Ecology, Evolution and Behavior Program, Department of Biology, Indiana University.

Education: B.A., Psychology, Millersville University (1991); M.S., Experimental Psychology, Villanova University (1993); Ph.D., Biopsychology, Johns Hopkins University (1998).

Professional Experience: Post-doc, Biology, Georgia State University (1998-2001); Professor, Biology (2001- ); Associate Editor, American Naturalist, Journal of Experimental Zoology A, International Journal of Zoology; Editorial Board, Hormones and Behavior; Secretary, Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology (2011-13); Co-author of ~140 peer-reviewed journal articles within the field of comparative endocrinology. Co-editor, special issue on “Immune-Neuroendocrine Interactions: Implications for Integrative and Comparative Biologists” in Hormones and Behavior (2016) and “A Brain for All Seasons (2021).

SICB Activities: Member (2001-present); Judge (DAB, DCE, DEDE), DAB Chair candidate (2016); DEDE Program Officer (2017-19); Co-organizer of SICB symposia in 2011 and 2014; symposium speaker (2011, 2014, 2016).

Other Memberships: Animal Behavior Society; Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology, North American Society for Comparative Endocrinology, American Physiological Society.

Research Interests: The primary goal of my laboratory’s research is to apply an integrative approach to understanding the interactions among the nervous, endocrine, and immune systems and behavior within ecologically relevant environmental contexts. Ongoing research in my laboratory focuses on investigating seasonal changes in aggression and gut microbiome influences on social behavior from both ultimate and proximate perspectives.

Goals Statement:  I have participated in SICB for the past 20 years and have always appreciated the meeting’s focus on physiology and behavior from a broadly integrative perspective that includes ecological and evolutionary approaches.  A key strength of DCE is its integration of ideas across disciplines, experimental approaches and animal models while focusing on the “common themes” of endocrine regulation.  SICB has traditionally been a vibrant home for comparative endocrinology research; as DCE Chair I will work with the divisional leadership to encourage the development of innovative and creative divisional and society-wide symposia that continue to connect across newly emerging fields of biological inquiry. As Chair, a key goal is to organize and communicate information on the ac­tivities and proceedings of the division to its members. Another important goal is to attract and recruit new membership to the division.  Students are the future of every SICB division, and DCE is no exception; I will work hard to ensure the growth and success of the society by not only sustaining our current membership, but also exploring creative ways to recruit new researchers to our division.

Candidates for Secretary

Jenny Ouyang 

Jenny Ouyang

Current Position: Assistant Professor, Department of Biology, University of Nevada Reno

Education: PhD, Ecology and Evolution, Princeton University (2012).

Professional Experience: National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, Netherlands Institute of Ecology (2013-2015), Postdoctoral Associate, Virginia Tech, (2012-2013).

SICB Activities: Regular attendee of SICB since 2011. Symposium organizer in 2018.

Other Memberships: Animal Behavior Society

Research Interests: Endocrine Evolution and Ecology, Urban Ecology. How do some individuals in the same population raise ten offspring while others only have one? How do some individuals survive cold winters and breed again while others do not live past their first winter? Our lab is interested in the ecology and evolution of physiological systems. To answer the questions above, we empirically test, in natural and laboratory populations, how, and at what rate, physiologically-regulated traits can evolve and enable organismal adaptation to changing environmental conditions.

Goals Statement: I am an organized individual who commits to accurate and timely meeting minutes, newsletters, and information gathering and dissemination. I love being a part of SICB, which has been so friendly and welcoming since I was a student, and I would like to promote SICB and DCE to more students and postdocs.

Haruka Wada 

Haruka Wada

Current Position: Associate Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, Auburn University

Education: B.S., Zoology, University of Washington (1999); Ph.D. Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, The University of Texas at Austin (2007).

Professional Experience: Postdoctoral Associate, Virginia Tech (2007-2009); Postdoctoral fellow, University of Western Ontario (2009-2011); Assistant Professor, Auburn University (2012-2020); Associate Professor, Auburn University (2020-present).

SICB Activities: I have been an active member of SICB since 2003 and involved in chairing sessions, judging presentations, and organizing two symposia (2014 and 2019) and a mentorship program.

Other Memberships: None

Research Interests: My primary research interest is to deepen our understanding of developmental phenotypic plasticity from a mechanistic perspective. Specifically, I aim to link neuroendocrine and cellular stress responses, molecular and cellular damage, and fitness-related measures in order to understand the causes behind context dependency in the outcome of a stressor. In other words, why does the same stressor enhance physiological functions or reproductive performance in one situation, but suppress them in another situation?

Goals Statement: SICB has been my primary society and conference to attend since 2003. What makes SICB so intellectually stimulating, cutting edge, and diverse is: 1) SICB actively promotes cross-talk between disciplines through selection of symposia, accompanying Integrative and Comparative Biology issues, social opportunities, and special awards, 2) SICB is committed to education and involvement of researchers from diverse backgrounds and makes great efforts in diversity, equity, and inclusion at all levels, and 3) SICB makes every effort to encourage student participation and communication among researchers at different stages of their careers. If I were selected as DCE Secretary, I would devote myself to enriching these strengths and helping DCE promote an even more interdisciplinary and inclusive community. Thank you for considering me for the DCE Secretary position.

Spring 2021: Division of Comparative Physiology & Biochemistry

Message from the Chair

Kenneth Welch, Jr., Chair.DCPB@sicb.org

The many Zoom faces of Ken Welch

I hope this note finds you safe, healthy, and happy. The 2021 Virtual Annual Meeting was a huge success, and much of the credit is due to our fearless leaders. In particular, credit goes to (now past-) President Beth Brainerd, heroic Program Officer Jake Socha, and DCPB PO, Kristi Montooth. No, we couldn’t enjoy socializing in person with each other over frosty beverages, but the online format enabled unprecedented participation, especially from international members, university AND high school students! I also really enjoyed the chat function for asking and answering questions. It was convenient to take my time reviewing questions and answers from others.

 

DCPB co-sponsored seven society-wide symposia at the virtual meeting. These were,

Student participation in this meeting was as strong as it has ever been. This quality was reflected in the 13 oral and 6 poster DCPB Best Student Presentation entrants. With the continuing help of our wonderful members, we did identify a clear winner in each category. This year, our winners are:

Congratulations to the winners, and to all the entrants, for their fine work.

Though we couldn’t convene for drinks and snacks in person immediately after the presentation, this year’s Bartholomew Award Lecture was nonetheless, outstanding! This year’s winner was Dr. Roslyn Dakin, assistant professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Dr. Dakin gave an expansive and clear talk entitled, “The scaling of behavior: insights into competitive and cooperative systems.” If we are able to meet in person in Phoenix in 2022, I hope you will join us at the reception to celebrate both Dr. Dakin’s as well as the 2022 winner.

I would like to extend a heartfelt thanks to the Bartholomew Award Committee. The committee was composed of Kim Hammond (chair, and past-Divisional Chair), Cassie Stoddard, Carol Fassbinder Orth, Lars Tomanek, and Blair Wolf. The Division greatly appreciates the hard work of the Bartholomew Award Committees in selecting the awardees and extends sincerest thanks to John Lighton and Robin Turner of Sable Systems International for their continued gracious support of the Bartholomew Award. New nominations for the George Bartholomew Award are due by August 23, 2021 and should be sent to Bart.award@sicb.org. More about the Award can be found here.

As always, the end of the annual meeting brings with it a changing of the divisional guard. I would like to thank Kristi Montooth (University of Nebraska) who took over the position of Program Officer starting in 2019 and just ended her term. I don’t need to tell all of you how much work Kristi put in to ensure that we had a great meeting. I also want to thank Andrea Rummel (Brown University), who is ending a three-year run as DCPB’s Student/Postdoc Representative. She and the rest of SPDAC also made this meeting a great one in many ways. Thank you both for your service. I also want to thank Emily Cornelius Ruhs (University of South Florida) for her valuable assistance in organizing this year’s Best Student Presentation judging assignments. And, welcome to Maria Stager (University of South Carolina) as our incoming SPDAC representative!

I want to welcome Jon Harrison (Arizona State University) as our new Chair-Elect, and Mike Sears (Clemson University) as our new Program Officer. I look forward to working with them both and wish Mike good luck as we prepare for a 2022 meeting that will occur in an as-yet-to-be-determined format! Personally, I’m voting for “in person” because a trip to Phoenix in January sounds pretty nice right about now! I wish you all the best.

 

Message from the Program Officer

Mike Sears, DPO.DCPB@sicb.org

I want to thank Kristi Montooth for her service as our Divisional Program Officer over the past two years. Organizing our divisional program is no small task under normal circumstances. That said, Kristi and the Program Committee did a fantastic job pivoting to an online model on relatively short notice during a pandemic. This was no small task. Regardless, the symposia and talks supported by our division were a big success. Hopefully, I will continue in Kristi’s footsteps to maintain a high quality program.

In the past, I have worked in various capacities in SICB to promote the work of graduate students, postdocs, and early-career scientists, while also promoting diversity and inclusion. Moving forward, my goals for the division will not change in that respect. I am committed to developing symposia, workshops, and mentoring programs with those values in mind. These activities are some of the most important items that our society provides as they help promote our membership’s careers across all levels. I will also look for new opportunities to prepare our membership for an ever-changing academic landscape, including opportunities to engage mid-career researchers to contribute to our program. Their participation sometimes decreases as they take on many roles at this career stage and in their personal lives. I welcome any ideas or feedback to improve our division along those lines.

Many of the great ideas for initiatives that make SICB and its annual meeting more inclusive and supportive come from the next generation of scientists. I want to encourage the full participation of all members in the society and in our DCPB. To our student and postdoctoral members, please take the opportunity to engage in society business, vote, and participate in symposium and workshop development. Your science, voices, and visions are the future of the society and of DCPB. You can follow our Twitter feeds @sicb_dcpb, @SICB_SPDAC, and @SICBtweets. Please e-mail me at DPO.DCPB@sicb.org with any ideas that you may have for meeting activities that support a diverse membership and advance their scientific and professional goals.

Students, don’t forget about the opportunity to participate in the “Best Student Presentation” competitions. Thank you to everyone who volunteered, chaired a session, and participated in or scored the best student presentations this year. Your contributions make the meetings a success!

We hope to see you in Phoenix, AZ 2022, where DCPB will be co-sponsoring a diverse lineup of six symposia:

  • “The deep and shallow history of aquatic life’s passages between marine and freshwater habitats”, Eric Schultz and Lisa Park-Boush
  • “Ecoimmunology: what unconventional organisms tell us after two decades”, Vania Assis and Stefanny Monteiro
  • “Open source solutions in experimental design”, Kirk Onthank and Richelle Tanner
  • “Causal mechanisms of interspecific metabolic scaling patterns”, Jon Harrison and Meghan Duell
  • “Phenological Plasticity: from Molecular Mechanisms to Ecological and Evolutionary Implications”, Cory Williams and Lise Aubry
  • “DNA metabarcoding across disciplines: sequencing our way to greater understanding across scales of biological organization”, Anna Forsman, Michelle Gaither, and Anna Savage
  • Please feel free to contact the organizers if you are interested in presenting in the oral or poster sessions that are complementary to these symposia.

Finally, we are looking for outstanding symposium proposals for the Austin 2023 meetings. The symposia are a vital component of our ICB journal. Our division has a history of co-sponsoring strong symposia that highlight emerging areas in integrative and comparative biology. Proposals will be due in late summer of 2021. Symposia that integrate across disciplines and include a diversity of speakers across speaker gender, background, and academic rank are more likely to gain broad support within SICB and with funding agencies such as NSF.

Student and postdoc members, you are the future of integrative and comparative biology, and we encourage you to take part in organizing a symposium or workshop; it is a great opportunity for professional and scientific development. Feel free to contact me at the e-mail address above or SICB Program Officer Jake Socha (programofficer@sicb.org) with ideas for symposia or with questions. I am happy to brainstorm ideas, facilitate collaborative symposium development, and provide past successful proposal examples to help in your proposal development and in obtaining external funding to help support the attendance of your speakers.

Finally, I encourage you to submit your research findings to the fully open-access SICB society journal, Integrative Organismal Biology. SICB members receive a significant discount for publication charges, making this one of the most reasonable open-access publishing options available!

 

Message from the Student and Postdoctoral Affairs Committee Representative

Maria Stager, mstager@mailbox.sc.edu

The Student and Postdoctoral Affairs Committee (SPDAC) contributed several items to this year’s virtual meeting! They produced numerous “how to” brochures for advance distribution, like “how to design a talk/poster,” as well as a video with pointers for first-time SICB goers, and they held “office hours” at their virtual booth. Their feature event was a virtual workshop on “Transferable Skills in Academia and Non-Academia,” which included a panel discussion of skills and careers led by ten expert panelists and followed by breakout-room discussions with the ~75 attendees.

Next year, we’ll again be hosting the SPDAC booth during the poster sessions, staffed with SPDAC committee members and other experts. The booth will feature skill shares and opportunities for networking, and we’ll be distributing those nifty brochures (including new brochures on mental health and resources for coping with grad school and postdoc life!). PLUS, we’ll be hosting a workshop on science communication! Stay tuned for more details about this as SICB 2022 approaches. If you have ideas for discussion or content that you’d like to see included, or any other suggestions, contact me via e-mail or the DCPB or SPDAC Twitter accounts (@sicb_dcpb and @SICB_SPDAC).

Don’t forget to take advantage of Charlotte Magnum Support for housing at the next meeting, apply for SICB Grants in Aid of Research, and check out other resources for support (many listed here for members). See you in Phoenix!

 

Message from the Secretary

Heather Liwanag, Secretary.DCPB@sicb.org

Field work during a pandemic looks a bit different

Hi there, DCPB! It has been quite the year, including a jam-packed virtual conference. If there is any news you would like to share with the DCPB membership, including job ads, postdoctoral positions, and opportunities for students, please feel free to contact me at Secretary.DCPB@sicb.org.

Elections for your new divisional Secretary will take place later this spring. We have two fantastic candidates for Secretary, Dr. Danielle Levesque and Dr. Caroline Williams. Ballots will be issued this month, so keep an eye out for the SICB Election e-mail and please vote! On behalf of the DCPB, I give my sincere thanks to these outstanding candidates for their willingness to serve our division.

I am so grateful to have been able to serve as your DCPB secretary. Thanks to all of our members for your continued support of the DCPB. I hope to see you all in Phoenix!

 

Candidates for Secretary

Danielle Levesque 

Danielle Levesque

Current Position: Assistant Professor, School of Biology and Ecology, University of Maine

Education: B.Sc., McGill University (2006); M.Sc., Brock University (2008); Ph.D., University of KwaZulu-Natal (2014); Postdoctoral Fellow, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (2014-2015)

Professional Experience: Assistant Professor, University of Maine (2015-present)

SICB Activities: I have been a SICB member since 2013 (DCPB and DEE), served as a judge for student posters/presentations, and have authored or co-authored 9 posters/presentations

Other Memberships: Canadian Society of Zoologists, Society for Experimental Biology, British Ecological Society

Research Interests: I am an evolutionary and ecological physiologist primarily interested in the comparative energetics and the evolution of mammalian temperature regulation. My research lies at the intersections of comparative physiology, ecology and evolutionary biology, and the synergies between these disciplines. Through field and laboratory based experiments, my students and I seek to understand how rigidity or flexibility in metabolism and body temperature regulation affects the energetics of a species, and how their evolutionary history has shaped these patterns.

Goals Statement: I joined SICB relatively late in my academic career, attending my first meeting during the final year of my PhD. At first, I was overwhelmed by the sheer scope and size of the meeting (it’s roughly four times the size of the Canadian Society of Zoologists meetings!) but I soon found a home and have enjoyed slowly building a SICB family over the past few years. It’s been a pleasure able to bring my students and introduce them to the wide world of comparative biology and to all of the wonderful SICB folks. The high caliber and variety of research presented at the meeting is always inspiring, and I particularly appreciate all of the student support both in terms of funding and mentoring. I am honored to receive the nomination to run for DCPB Secretary and I am grateful for the chance give back to the society. If elected, in addition to enthusiastically performing the duties of the Secretary, I plan on further promoting the division by increasing its presence on social media, and continuing to encourage new members to join SICB, attend the meetings, and become a part of the wider DCPB community.

 

Caroline M. Williams 

Caroline Williams

Current Positions: Associate Professor, Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley

Education: B.Sc., University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand (2002); M.Sc., University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand (2004); Ph.D., University of Western Ontario, London, Canada (2012); Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Florida, Gainesville (2012-201)

Professional Experience: Assistant Professor (2014-2020) and Associate Professor (2020-present), University of California, Berkeley; Associate Editor, Functional Ecology (2015-present); Associate Editor, Proceedings of the Royal Society B (2018-2020)

SICB Activities: DCPB nominations committee (2020), George Bartholomew Award committee (2019, 2020), George Bartholomew Award recipient (2018), Symposium co-organizer (with Gregory Ragland), “Evolutionary Impacts of Seasonality” (2017). Invited symposium presentations 2014 (“Macro and micro of nutrient effects in animal ecology and physiology”), and 2016 (“Beyond the Mean”). DCPB Student presentations judge (2016, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2021). Attended annual meetings: 2009, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2021 (virtual).

Other Memberships: Australian and New Zealand Society for Comparative Physiology and Biochemistry, British Ecological Society

Research Interests: My research focuses on how environmental variability drives evolution of metabolic physiology and life history in ectotherms. Research in my lab explores evolutionary impacts of seasonality, and consequences of winter climate change on performance and fitness of insects. Current work addresses the impact of spatial and temporal variation in snow cover on montane beetles in the Sierra Nevada. Another research theme addresses how life histories evolve to meet demands of variable environments. For this work, we use a comparative system of North American Gryllus field crickets with a flight polymorphism to understand the genomic, metabolic, and functional basis of this classic threshold trait. Beyond these specific research themes, I have broad interests in stress tolerances, thermal biology, nutrition and energetics in animals.

Goals Statement: I have benefited greatly from long and close association with SICB and DCPB, and would be glad to serve the division as secretary. If elected, my main goals will be to promote the field of comparative physiology and biochemistry through regular communication, and broaden participation in our division. I will work with other division officers to produce high-quality newsletters, and communicate notes from annual business meetings faithfully to members. I will continue to build the DCPB researcher’s database, highlighting the work of researchers from historically excluded and under-represented groups in “Scientist Spotlights” that can be downloaded as lecture slides. I will work with professional societies focused on broadening participation in STEM to promote student opportunities, such as SACNAS, ABRCMS, and minority-serving institutions.

Spring 2021: Division of Evolutionary Developmental Biology

Message from the Chair

Deirdre Lyons, Chair.DEDB@sicb.org

Dede Lyons. Confocal image of a juvenile nudibranch (Berghia stephanieae) labeled with acetylated alpha tubulin (peripheral magenta), phalloidin (yellow), and DAPI for nematocysts (cyan). Strong dinoflagellate autofluorescence (magenta) highlights the gut.

This year’s Virtual SICB meeting pushed the boundaries of how we attend conferences. After almost 2 months of programming, it seems part of my weekly routine to view a talk or poster, zoom with students, or catch up with colleagues at a SICB event. The Executive Committee really knocked themselves out to make this meeting as interactive and creative as possible, and they deserve many thanks, emoji high fives, etc.

The DEDB Best Student Presentation sessions were particularly strong this year. Big congratulations to Guilherme Gainett (University of Wisconsin-Madison) for winning Best Student talk, and Leah DeLorenzo (Clemson University) for winning Best Student poster. Please remind your students to submit their abstracts under this category for the 2022 meeting in Phoenix.  And faculty, please donate your time to judge (thank you to those who judged this year!). I’d like to thank our new Student/Postdoc Representative Ryan Hulett (Harvard University) for organizing the Evo-Devo Meet-ups, virtually this time of course. These have been well-attended each year and are important for networking and community building in our field.  Next year, in addition to this networking/mentoring opportunity, I encourage DEDB faculty, postdocs and students to participate in the SICB Broadening Participation Mentor -Mentee Matching Program. Faculty can sign up to be both mentors and mentees. Of the >110 participants this year, only 3 were DEDB members. Let’s increase that number next year.

It’s time to start planning for the upcoming meetings. The annual meeting in 2022 will be in Phoenix, in-person (yay!). You can still organize a workshop for that meeting. These are great ways to get a group of people together to discuss a topic, or honor a retiring colleague, or disseminate information from a collaborative grant, it’s very flexible! One workshop idea already put forward is one to discuss starting a Junior Faculty training program, inspired by the “bootcamp” organized by the Society for Developmental Biology, geared towards the needs of the SICB community. If you would be interested in contributing to this workshop please contact Leslie Babonis (who proposed this great idea) or Billie Swalla (who jumped into to help organize). Thank you Leslie and Billie!  The deadline for submitting workshop proposals for the Phoenix meeting (2022) is in August 2021. Contact your divisional Program Officer Matt Rockman for more information.

It is also time to develop your ideas for innovative symposia for the 2023 meeting, in Austin (seems like we were just there!). As you all know, great symposia are the heart of this meeting, and creative exciting themes get faculty and trainees who are not SICB regulars to attend meetings. The key to making symposium-organizing fun and painless is to start early! Email me and/or our DEDB Program Officer Matt Rockman with your ideas this spring and we will help you build a strong proposal. Symposia are a great mechanism for bringing diverse colleagues together to integrate across disciplines or levels of biological organization; they are also important opportunities for postdoc and student-organizers to build their professional network. The deadline for submitting symposia proposals for the Austin meeting (2023) is in August 2021.

In closing, I’d like to thank everyone who stepped up to participate in SICB this year, it was a really fun conference, even if done remotely. I’d like to thank Prashant Sharma, our outgoing Secretary for his great work, ideas, and help during his tenure. Leslie Babonis is taking over the position of DEDB secretary, welcome Leslie! If you are interested in running for office, please let me or the other officers know; we are always thrilled to have volunteers on the list when elections come around. There are many ways to support the DEDB division, and we need your creativity, wisdom, and perspective!

Happy year everyone, and see you in Phoenix!

 

Message from the Program Officer

Matt Rockman, DPO.DEDB@sicb.org 

Matt Rockman. Time-lapse microscopy of C. elegans embryos from recombinant inbred lines shows that genetic variation influences the dynamics of spindle movements during the first cleavage. This variation helps test biophysical models for spindle behavior (Farhadifar et al., eLife 9, e55877, 2020).

SICB 2021, experienced online via “The Platform,” tested the limits of how much integrative and comparative biology we can handle — no more concurrent sessions, no more lunch ran long, no more too late at the pub last night, to keep us from learning the latest and greatest. And now, a few weeks later, the whole meeting is 404 not found, a warm memory, tears in the rain.

We can now look forward to Phoenix 2022, where the in-person SICB meeting will rise like … is there something that’s like a phoenix but not so literally? DEDB is delighted to sponsor several symposia for the Phoenix meeting. These include “The deep and shallow history of aquatic life’s passages between marine and freshwater habitats,” “Lesser known transitions: organismal form and function across abiotic gradients,” “Open source solutions in experimental design,” “Causal mechanisms of interspecific metabolic scaling patterns,” “Morphology and evolution of female copulatory morphology in Amniotes,” and “Phenological Plasticity: from Molecular Mechanisms to Ecological and Evolutionary Implications.”

But where, you ask, is the evolutionary developmental biology? Well, there’s some in there, but there could be more. That’s where you come in: let’s put together some DEDB-themed symposia for the Austin 2023 meeting. If you have an idea that you’d like to turn into a science party with all your research friends, or if you’d like to make some new friends whose work you’re excited about, let me know. We can work together to craft a proposal that will win over the SICB program committee. The proposals are due in August, but the time to start planning and lining up speakers is now.

In the meantime, the Phoenix meeting, less than a year from now, provides opportunities to host workshops. As Dede describes above, these are terrifically flexible in content and format. Use a workshop to teach people a method, or to trick people you want to work with into meeting you in Arizona. The deadline for workshop proposals is August— don’t be a stranger.

Finally, both workshops and symposia are great venues for early-career scientists to gain experience and exposure. If you’re a PhD student or a postdoc, you can have your name in lights, and in the ICB journal. Let’s make it happen.

 

Message from the Secretary

Leslie Babonis, Secretary.DEDB@sicb.org

Leslie Babonis. To be or not to be (a stem cell). Notch signaling influences the choice to maintain proliferative state (red) or differentiate into a stinging cell (yellow) in the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis.

Ahoy DEDB! I am happy to come aboard as the new divisional secretary. My first act in this role is to extend my most sincere thanks to Prashant Sharma for his outstanding service as the outgoing secretary. His dedication over the past two years have made this transition easy and I am honored to follow in his footsteps. I am also forever indebted to the two volunteers who stepped up to run for secretary-elect this year: Allison Edgar and Jason Macrander (see their bios below). Elections will take place in the coming month so please keep an eye out for the ballot and make sure to vote. As you all know, divisional activities live and die by the efforts of our dedicated volunteers. Cheers to Allison, Jason, and all of our esteemed DEDB officers (past, present, and future) for their generosity and support in keeping our division on an even keel.

We are just weeks into 2021 and I am already looking forward to the 2022 meeting in Phoenix. The promise of engaging science paired with the joy of real, live human interactions (gasp!) is almost too much to bear – can’t wait to see you all there! Don’t forget to pencil in some time to attend our annual Member Meeting in 2022 – this is our opportunity to brainstorm about how to best utilize our division. Personally, I am excited to discuss how we can strengthen SICB’s ability to serve as the international home of EvoDevo and how we can better serve our increasingly diverse membership. Other topics of conversation are most welcome so remember to pack your thinking cap! If you happened to miss the 2021 DEDB member meeting and want to catch up on who/what/where we are, you can check out the minutes online, posted here.

New for 2021: The year 2020 challenged us all to reckon with some harsh realities about the history of STEM and the role that each of us plays in the ongoing disparities faced by women, people of color, and other underrepresented/minoritized groups in the sciences. In an effort to increase visibility for those who may otherwise struggle to find their opportunity to shine, we would like to announce a new segment that will appear in each of our divisional newsletters. In the spring, we will honor the memory of a “Forgotten Hero of EvoDevo” as a reminder of the many people who paved the way for the rest of us to achieve greatness. In the fall, we celebrate the future promise of EvoDevo up-and-comers in the “EvoDevo Diversity Spotlight.” Anyone wishing to contribute suggestions for candidates to be highlighted in either segment should email the divisional secretary (secretary.DEDB@sicb.org).

 

Message from the Student/Postdoctoral Affairs Committee Representative

Ryan Hulett, rhulett@g.harvard.edu 

Ryan Hulett. The frontal organ (magenta) of the acoel Hofstenia miamia; nuclei in blue.

Hello DEDB folks!

Thank you to everyone who attended and presented at SICB 2021. There is/was so much fascinating work done by such inspirational scientists. The poster sessions and recorded talks allowed me to peruse so many wonderful scientific stories.

The virtual Evo-Devo meet-ups was another popular event this year because of the wonderful hosts and trainees that signed up. A very special and heartfelt thank you to our hosts for supporting this program and to our students for signing up with such enthusiasm (even when I sent a locked version of the sign-up sheet). Look out for an email from me in the fall regarding the 2022 event, as well as opportunities to support your meeting and travel costs. As always, I would love your feedback on your experiences this year and input on how we can improve these initiatives in the future. We hope to see you all next year!

The SPDAC (Student and Postdoctoral Affairs Committee) held a virtual Exhibitor’s booth this year where SPDAC members across divisions held office hours to answer any questions, scientific or conference related. We also developed brochures covering a variety of topics including exploring non-academic careers, tips for first-generation students, and how to design conference talks/posters to name a few. If you have ideas for topics you would like to see incorporated at the SPDAC booth or suggestions for a workshop, please feel free to get in touch.

If you have any comments, questions, suggestions, or would like to get more involved in DEDB- please contact me. Have a healthy spring + summer and I hope you plan to attend SICB next year!

 

Forgotten Heroes of EvoDevo

*NEW SPRING NEWSLETTER SEGMENT* 

Ethel Browne Harvey. Embryo Project Encyclopedia  ISSN: 1940-5030 embryo.asu.edu/handle/10776/3144.

Spring has sprung and we are now in the thick of women’s history month. As tribute to one of the inspiring women in EvoDevo, our division would like to explicitly recognize Ethel Browne Harvey (1885-1965) as the 2021 Forgotten Hero of EvoDevo. Through a series of careful tissue-grafting experiments in Hydra, Ethel Browne (then a graduate student) discovered the capacity of a small population of cells to determine the fate of their neighbors. That’s right: she discovered the organizer. This discovery was so transformational to the field of evolution that it elicited a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1935, but that prize was not awarded to her. Hans Spemann (1869-1941) received that prize for his (re)discovery of the organizing capacity of the blastopore lip in amphibians. These experiments, largely performed by Spemann’s graduate student, Hilde Mangold (1898-1924), are truly beautiful and their contribution to our field, indisputable. Spemann and Mangold stood on the shoulders of someone who should have been a giant to achieve greatness and so today we honor you, Ethel Browne Harvey, and your forgotten contribution to our field. Further kudos to Howard M. Lenhoff (1929-2011) for his engaging narrative of this story, which you can read in this article.

 

Candidates for Secretary-Elect

Allison Edgar 

Allison Edgar

Current position: Postdoctoral Fellow, Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience, University of Florida, Saint Augustine, FL

Education: Ph.D. Biology, Duke University (2019); B.A. Biology, Reed College (2008)

SICB activities: joined 2016; 2020 Evo-Devo virtual meetups

Other memberships: Society for Developmental Biology

Research interests: I have worked on a number of different evolution and development questions with diverse invertebrates. A wonderful research experience documenting variation in very early development among spiders cemented my identity as an evolutionary developmental biologist as an undergraduate. My graduate work focused on changes to the gene regulatory network in the embryos of a sea urchin that has undergone a dramatic evolutionary change in life history. I began my postdoc hoping to look at ctenophore embryonic development but started a side project about when and how these animals become reproductively mature. This project led me to consider parental nutrition and provisioning more deeply than I have before, which will allow me new access to questions about early embryogenesis, bringing the project full-circle.

Goals statement: SICB is a beloved conference for many because it is a unique opportunity to engage with researchers at different career stages and who work on topics far outside our own areas of expertise. Evolutionary Developmental Biology could not have a better home. I love the expansive and deeply interdisciplinary nature of Evolutionary Developmental Biology and so I am committed to bringing together scientists from all points on the evo-devo map. In graduate school I co-organized a weekly Evo-Devo seminar for several years; something I learned in that position is how many people doing work that is clearly at the intersection of evolution and development do not realize that they are Evolutionary Developmental Biologists! If elected, I will work to increase the number of SICB members who recognize that their research interests already intersect with DEDB so that this wonderfully interdisciplinary field can continue to grow and flourish. I was able to participate as a mentor for the first time this year in the Evo-Devo virtual meet-up program and it was a deeply gratifying experience. Whether we are able to gather in person next year or once again gather only virtually, I will support and expand these opportunities for connection. As we all work to recover our pace and equilibrium in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, I think it is especially important that we support trainees, including recent trainees who might have lost that status. I would advocate that funding, mentorship, and other opportunities to participate be extended to members who held that status prior to the pandemic and are seeking to resume their training. Finally, I will ensure timely publication of regular updates on the division’s activities and achievements through the newsletter.

 

Jason Macrander 

Jason Macrander (center)

Current Position: Assistant Professor of Marine Biology, Florida Southern College, Lakeland, FL.

Education: Ph.D., Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology, The Ohio State University (2016); M.S. , Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University of Nebraska – Lincoln (2010); B.S., Biological Sciences and Fisheries and Wildlife, University of Nebraska – Lincoln (2007)

Professional Experience: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of North Carolina, Charlotte (2016 – 2018), Adviser: Dr. Adam Reitzel

SICB activities: Member of SICB for approx. 10 years. Social Media Team Leader for the Integrative and Comparative Biology Journal. Other division memberships: DEE Ecology and Evolution, DIZ Invertebrate Zoology, DPCB Phylogenetics and Comparative Biology (Formerly: DSEB)

Other Memberships/Associations: Aiptasia Symbiosis ResourceInitiative for Venom Associated Microbes and Parasites (iVAMP)

Research Interest: I am an evolutionary biologist using comparative ‘omics approaches in sea anemones and other venomous animals to address questions concerning evolution, symbiosis, and protein function. Students in my lab are able to study venom, a functionally important (but poorly studied) phenotype and ask questions that are focused on different developmental stages, relative locations of genes within the genome, or organisms’ interactions with one another and/or their environment.

Goal Statement: Every year I look forward to attending SICB meetings. Everything we do in research is interdisciplinary and I feel that SICB is a venue that permits celebrating our collaborative approach to science in a supportive and meaningful way. Shortly after starting at Florida Southern College I was able to bring undergraduate research students from my lab to present their research in Austin during our 2020 meeting. They shared my enthusiasm for the society and joy of interacting with other members of our interdisciplinary scientific community. I am incredibly thankful to the society for providing such a positive and supportive venue to support everyone from tenured R1 faculty to undergraduate student researchers at small institutions and I want to give back. As team leader for the ICB Social Media team I have worked collaboratively with many SICB members about research published in ICB. As Secretary of DEDB I would like to further bridge that connection and celebrate members accomplishments and achievements to ensure DEDB and its members are recognized. As a member of several SICB divisions as I’ve benefited from interactions with other divisions and would build an online network to complement social media, SICB resources, and other divisions to bridge memberships and communication to establish collaborative approaches. Finally, as Secretary I would provide a voice for the primarily undergraduate institutions helping bridge our diverse interdisciplinary community. Regardless of election outcomes, I’m looking forward to future SICB meetings and I truly enjoy being part of such a wonderful group of scientists.

Spring 2021: Division of Ecoimmunology and Disease Ecology

Message from the Chair

Laura Zimmerman, chair.dede@sicb.org

Laura Zimmerman

Every year, I look forward to SICB. It’s a chance for one week out of the year, to just focus on science. I never fail to walk away from SICB inspired and refreshed, as I learn about new techniques and ideas, forge new collaborations, and catch up with friends and colleagues I only see once a year. Our conference is a chance to forget about those other commitments of my job that often suck away my time and leave little chance to just read journals or spend time at my lab bench. SICB reminds me why I got into this career in the first place – the joy of doing and learning about science. This year, more than ever, I needed that. So kudos to everyone who worked so hard to make sure the important aspects of SICB were recreated virtually!

Having talks on demand allowed us to venture into novel territories, workshops taught us new skills, and live discussion panels gave us a chance to hash out innovative ideas. It took a lot of work behind the scenes, and I want to give a particular thanks to our DEDE executive board, especially to our outgoing officers: Program Officer Cynthia Downs, Secretary Ken Field, and Student/Postdoc rep Ashley Love. Ashley once again organized a wonderful Lunch with an Eco-immunologist event. We appreciate your service to SICB! We also welcome our new officers, Program Officer Laura Mydlarz, Secretary Patricia Lopes, Chair-elect James Adelman, and Student/Postdoc rep Jennifer Houtz!

Thank you to all who participated, worked as a judge, helped organize, and presented at SICB this year. It has been a challenging year for so many reasons, and so we appreciate the time that everyone has taken out of their overwhelmingly busy schedules to make sure that the annual SICB conference was once again a huge success.

 

Message from the Program Officer

Laura D Mydlarz, dpo.dede@sicb.org

Laura Mydlarz

Even though our annual meeting looked very different this year, the virtual meeting was a huge success for DEDE!  DEDE hosted 54 talks across 5 sessions and 26 posters across 3 sessions. This year we continued our annual tradition of hosting an oral presentation session dedicated to the DEDE Best Student Oral Presentation Competition. The 8 finalists were chosen from the abstracts submitted. In addition, ten students competed in the DEDE Best Student Poster.  The winners of both contests are announced in the note from the DEDE Secretary. A special thanks to those who volunteered to judge student presentations; your participation and enthusiasm for judging our students makes this a seamless process and we couldn’t do it without you!

DEDE co-sponsored 4 symposia: 1) Biology’s best friend: Bridging disciplinary gaps to advance canine scienceorganized by Caleb Bryca and Ana Jimenez, 2) The integrative biology of pigment organelles, organized by Florent Figon, Jérôme Casas, and Leila Deravi, 3) Biology Beyond the Classroom: Experiential Learning through Authentic Research, Design, and Community Engagement, organized by Alexandria Hansen, Lisa Whitenack, Patrice Connors, and Hayley Lanier, and 4) Blinded by the Light: Effects of Light Pollution across Diverse Natural Systems, organized by Meredith Kernbach, Stephen M. Ferguson, Valentina Alaasam, Colleen Miller, and Clint Francis. Keep an eye out for all the amazing papers associated with the presented talks that will come out in Integrative and Comparative Biology this year.

DEDE also represented extremely well in the Audience Choice awards. Vania Assis won one of the audience choice awards for her talk “Ectoparasites impact on stress and immune response in Florida invasive cane toads (Rhinella marina)” in the Immunity session! Overall this was a great meeting for ecoimmunology and disease ecology topics as well as DEDE members!

As we look forward to SICB 2022 in Phoenix, AZ (I think we all hope to be in person so we can catch up and socialize again!), it is shaping up to be another outstanding meeting. I’m excited to announce that DEDE will be sponsoring 3 symposia:

  1. Ecoimmunology: what unconventional organisms tell us after two decades. Organizers: Vania Assis and Stefanny Monteiro
  2. Open source solutions in experimental design. Organizers: Kirk Onthank and Richelle Tanner
  3. DNA metabarcoding across disciplines: sequencing our way to greater understanding across scales of biological organization. Organizers: Anna Forsman, Michelle Gaither and Anna Savage

To ensure that DEDE continues to grow and thrive, it is important that DEDE members continue to host ecoimmune/disease-related symposia. We are now soliciting proposals for symposia for the 2023 meeting in Austin, TX.  Symposia are eligible for NSF funding, and symposia that have complementary sessions and/or associated workshops, and that invite speakers from diverse institutions across a range of career stages, are most likely to receive NSF funding. If you have an idea, email me at dpo.dede@sicb.org or the SICB program officer (Jake Socha) at programofficer@sicb.org for more details or information. We also have sample NSF proposals that we can share. I highly encourage senior graduate students and post-docs to submit proposals, as a symposium is an excellent way to network with researchers in your field, to highlight a research area you think is exciting, and to help shape future programming at SICB.

Thank you for your ongoing participation and support of DEDE events, and thanks again to all who volunteered to judge student presentations. I sincerely hope to see you all in person in Phoenix, AZ!

 

Message from the Secretary

Patricia C. Lopes, secretary.dede@sicb.org

Patricia Lopes

There’s nothing like a terrible situation (a pandemic) to highlight the importance of the type of work we all do in the Division of Ecoimmunology and Disease Ecology! The pandemic also made it even more evident to me how I appreciate my live interactions with everyone at the SICB annual meetings! Even though it was different, the virtual SICB meeting was a huge success and enabled people from a much larger number of locations to participate and feel included. I still hope to see you all in Phoenix, AZ, next year!

 

 

I wanted to highlight and congratulate our Best Student Presentation winners:

Jennifer Houtz, at Cornell University, won the Best Oral Presentation, “Microbial diversity and flexibility are associated with lay date in a wild songbird.”

Jennifer Houtz

Korin Jones, at Virginia Tech, won the Best Poster Presentation, “Exposing frog embryos to bacterial isolates: Colonization order impacts structure of the tadpole microbiome.”

Korin Jones

Also, a big thanks to Laura Mydlarz for organizing the judging, and to all of those who served as judges.

We want to make DEDE and SICB continuously more inclusive. Please follow DEDE (@SICBDEDE) and SICB (@SICB_) on Twitter and Facebook, so you can learn about opportunities associated with the division and with the society. For instance, we used Twitter this year to call for candidates to stand for DEDE positions. You can also contact me directly (secretary.dede@sicb.org) to find out what opportunities are coming up within DEDE and different ways in which you can become involved with the division. We would like to thank all candidates for this year’s elections. Please exercise your right to vote: all SICB members are eligible regardless of career stage.

 

Message from the Student/Postdoctoral Affairs Committee Representative

Ashley Love, acl017@uark.edu

We had a great turnout for our “Meet an Ecoimmunologist/Disease Ecologist” event with meet-ups between student/post-docs and faculty working in Ecoimmunology and Disease Ecology. Thank you to everyone that participated this year! Stay tuned for information about similar events for SICB 2022.

This year the SICB Student/Postdoctoral Affairs Committee (SPDAC) sponsored a virtual workshop on “Transferable Skills in Academia and Non-Academia”. This workshop consisted of a 30-minute panel discussion with 10 experts from a variety of fields and then 45-minutes of breakout-room discussions between attendees and the 10 panelists. SPDAC members also created numerous “how to” brochures that were available at the virtual SPDAC booth. These “how to” brochures include (but are not limited to) information on grant writing, getting into graduate school, making a teaching/diversity/research statement, and improving science communication skills.  Brochures will continue to be available at future meetings. We would also like to welcome Jennifer Houtz as the new DEDE student/postdoc representative!

Finally, if you don’t already, please follow us on Twitter (@SICBDEDE) and Facebook. Throughout the year, please tag us in your posts and tweets sharing papers, grants, post-doc or student opportunities, and other news.

 

Candidate for Program Officer-Elect

Daniel Becker

Daniel Becker

Current Position: Assistant Professor, University of Oklahoma

Education: B.A. Bard College (2010), Ph.D. University of Georgia (2017)

Professional Experience: Assistant Professor, University of Oklahoma (2020-present); Postdoctoral Fellow, Indiana University (2018-2020); Postdoctoral Researcher, Montana State University (2017-2018)

SICB Activities: Member of DEDE (2014-present); Student/Postdoc Representative, DEDE (2015-2018); Symposium Co-Chair (2019); DEDE Session Chair (2018-2020); Judge for Best Student Presentation (2018-2020); Integrative & Comparative Biology reviewer (2019)

Other Memberships: Ecological Society of America

Research Interests: My research explores the drivers of infection dynamics in wildlife hosts of zoonotic pathogens, especially in highly mobile taxa like bats and birds. My work combines spatial and temporal field studies with immunology, mathematical modeling, and data mining to understand how pathogens spread within and between host populations, particularly in the context of environmental change. Ongoing projects in my lab group include how agricultural intensification affects immunity and infection in Neotropical bats as well as the interactions between urbanization, migration, and epidemiology in North American songbirds and bats.

Goals Statements: I would be honored to serve as Program Officer for DEDE. SICB was my first society conference and has since been my home base for ecoimmunology and disease ecology research. DEDE is especially important for our field as it bridges the within-host and between-host processes that are often studied in isolation from one another. I’ve enjoyed the range of symposia covered by DEDE thus far and would welcome the opportunity to further expand our division’s influence. As Program Officer, I would recruit symposia organizers that represent a range of approaches and perspectives to ecoimmunology and disease ecology. It will be equally critical to include organizers and speakers from diverse backgrounds to improve representation in our field. By working with the Student/Postdoc Representative, I will also ensure opportunity for undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs to network with organizers and speakers.

 

Candidates for Secretary-Elect

Sarah A. Knutie

Current Position: Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut

Sarah Knutie

Education: B.S. University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (2006); M.S. University of Tulsa (2009); Ph.D. University of Utah (2014)

Professional Experience: Assistant Professor, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut (2017-Present); Post-doctoral Researcher, Department of Integrative Biology, University of South Florida (2014-2017)

SICB activities: Member of DEDE (2014-Present); DEDE Best Student Presentation Judge (2015, 2017, 2019); DEDE Best Student Presentation Organizer (2017); Lunch with an Ecoimmunologist Mentor (2019); SICB Broadening Participation Mentor (2019); Symposium participant (New Orleans, LA, 2017); ICB reviewer (2017)

Other Memberships: American Ornithological Society, American Society of Parasitologists, Ecological Society of America

Research Interests: The research in my lab spans both fundamental and applied ideas in disease ecology and ecoimmunology. We use field- and captive-based studies, combined with advanced molecular techniques, to understand the evolutionary ecology of host defenses against parasites, especially in response to environmental change. Currently, my lab has three main foci, which include studying: 1) the effect of urbanization on host defense strategies against invasive avian vampire flies, 2) how local ecology affects host resistance and tolerance to ectoparasites in a box-nesting bird system, and 3) the effects of overwintering ecology on frog immune-microbiota-parasite interactions. https://www.knutielab.com

Goals Statement: I would be proud to serve as the SICB DEDE secretary because this division has been my main societal home since its conception. I believe that the DEDE represents an ever growing home for disease ecologists and ecoimmunologists at every level of the profession. As a division leader, I will be committed to effectively communicating DEDE news and content to its members and beyond. For example, I will use my experience and expertise in social media communication to help promote DEDE to expand membership. I am also deeply committed to training students at every level and will also continue to support student participation and activities, which includes support to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion.

George Brusch IV

Current Position: Assistant Professor, Department of Integrative Biology, Oklahoma State University.

George Brusch IV

Education: B.S., Cal Poly – San Luis Obispo (2014); Ph.D. Arizona State University (2019).

Professional Experience: Postdoc, Environmental Physiology, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (2019-20); Assistant Professor, Oklahoma State University (2020-present).

SICB Activities: SICB member since 2015, member of DEDE, DCPB; Mentor for SICB Broadening Participation Program (2018)

Other Memberships: International Society of Developmental and Comparative Immunology, Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science

Research Interests: Research in the NET lab (Nutritional, Energetic, and Temperature physiology) investigates how animals respond to resource limitations. Our current focus is primarily on water limitations. We examine how water balance affects physiological functions such as immunocompetence, reproduction, and metabolism, as well as how animals mitigate potential negative effects. We use multiple levels of biological organization (communities, organisms, systems, cellular and molecular mechanisms) and a combination of field studies and manipulative laboratory experiments to understand the physiological implications of and adaptive responses to water limitation.  

Goals Statement: It would be an honor to serve as Secretary for DEDE which has been my home since I attended my first SICB meeting in 2015. As a first-generation college student who was inspired to become a biologist by the student-centered experiences I obtained at SICB meetings, I recognize how important society and divisional involvement is to academic success.  My professional experiences have taught me the tremendous value of effectively communicating to a wide audience through newsletters, meetings, workshops, outreach events, and division-wide social events. My central focus as a graduate student, postdoc, and faculty member has been giving back by mentoring and supporting students from a variety of backgrounds in the classroom, laboratory, and at society meetings. I plan to work with everyone in the division to connect with students from all backgrounds and encourage their development while growing our membership. I am especially excited to advocate for DEI as Secretary; I believe that each component is essential to our mission. By promoting diversity we bring unique perspectives, through equity we ensure that everyone has what they need to succeed, and an inclusive environment celebrates, values, and respects a myriad of cultural perspectives.

Spring 2021: Division of Ecology and Evolution

Message from the Chair

Frances Bonier, Chair.DEE@sicb.org

Frances Bonier

Hi everyone! This is my first message as the new Chair of DEE. I’m excited to be taking the reins from Cam Ghalambor, and want to thank him for his hard work for the division over the last two years, including guiding DEE through the unprecedented 2021 virtual meeting. I’d also like to thank a few other outgoing DEE officers and welcome new ones. Martha Muñoz has finished her term as Secretary and stepped right into the role of Program Officer-Elect – thank you Martha for giving so much of your time to helping DEE thrive! (And also, congratulations to Martha on her wonderful Gans Award Lecture in this year’s meeting.) I’d like to welcome new DEE Secretary Christine Miller and thank Sarah Diamond for her work in the role of Program Officer. A big thank you also to outgoing grad student representative Craig Marshall, and welcome to new postdoc representative Anusha Shankar, as well as Chair-elect Tonia Schwartz. We will be running an election this spring to select a new Secretary-elect, with a couple of great candidates lined up – Ryan Earley and Alex Gunderson. You can find their candidate statements in this newsletter. Later this summer, we will also have a special bylaws election that will include a question about adding a small dues fee for DEE membership. We’ve discussed the idea of adding a fee for division membership at our business meetings for a few years, and the idea seems to have fairly broad support. The main purpose of the added fee would be to support expanding our division social and networking event at the annual meeting (Beers & Brains), so all interested students and postdocs can participate.

I’ve been attending SICB meetings since I was a grad student – it’s my extended scientific family, and so I was sad not to be able to take a break from normal life and go somewhere warmer than my home in Kingston, Ontario to catch up with old friends and immerse in science for 5 days this past January. I’m sure many of us missed that in-person experience, but also appreciate the monumental efforts made by the SICB Executive Committee to make the virtual meeting a success. The opening week of live plenaries, symposia, and Best Student Presentation sessions preserved a lot of what I value most about SICB meetings, and the extended online programming gave me a great excuse to take a break from Zoom meetings, overseeing home-schooling, and many of the other new norms of pandemic life to hear some cool science. I hope you all enjoyed it as much as I did!

I want to congratulate this year’s winners of the Raymond B. Huey Awards for the DEE Best Student Presentations. Ray Huey was on my PhD committee, and he was incredibly influential in shaping who I am as a biologist, so I love having the opportunity to be involved with this award. The Huey Award sessions are always a highlight of the annual meeting for me, and this year was no exception. Colorado State University PhD student Alex Mauro won the Huey Award for his oral presentation, “How tradeoffs constrain evolvability at the range limit of the Trinidadian guppy.” Benedict University undergraduate student Jameel Moore won the Huey Award for his poster, “Interactive effects of ecologically relevant temperature regimes and p,p’-DDE exposure on patterns of gonadal gene expression in the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis).” Both presentations really embodied SICB ideals – integrating across levels of organization to address important questions. Congrats Alex and Jameel! Thanks also to the many DEE members who helped out with judging talks and posters this year. I also strongly encourage student DEE members to submit their abstracts to be considered for next year’s Huey sessions. We are eager to showcase the amazing research being done by DEE’s student members!

Now’s the time to start thinking about exciting symposium ideas for the 2023 meeting. Do you have a new, integrative research direction that you think would benefit from bringing together some of the world’s experts and exciting upcoming biologists in the field? Organizing a symposium can be a great way to get all those experts in the same room, sharing diverse perspectives. Symposium presentations are also written up for publication in Integrative & Comparative Biology, so your exciting ideas can translate into meaningful contributions to the literature as well. If you have an idea for a symposium, please reach out to DEE Program Officer Martha Muñoz for guidance on how to develop your idea and submit a proposal.

We’re looking for new ways to stay in touch with division members in between meetings, and so if you’d like to keep up with what DEE is up to in between newsletters and join in discussions with other DEE members, I’d encourage you to join our Facebook group (SICB Division of Ecology and Evolution), follow us on Twitter (@SICB_DEE), and/or join our new Slack workspace (SICB Division of Ecology and Evolution). We’re also interested in involving student and postdoctoral DEE members in generating social media content – if you’d like to be involved in that initiative, you can get in touch with DEE Secretary Christine Miller or DEE Postdoctoral Rep Anusha Shankar. Thanks to Anusha and Christine for spearheading these efforts!

As vaccine programs roll out across the world, I’m feeling optimistic about the world getting back to some semblance of normal in the not-too-distant future. In the meantime, take care, stay safe, and fingers crossed we’re all able to get together in 2022 in Phoenix!

Message from the Program Officer

Sarah Diamond, DPO.DEE@sicb.org 

Sarah Diamond

Hi Division of Ecology and Evolution Members,

Miraculously, we pulled off the remotely-delivered 2021 meeting, whew! It was great to see all the planning for this unprecedented SICB translate into such a fun and informative meeting. I missed seeing and interacting with all of you in person, but there was so much activity in the chat windows on the talks and the socials that it was almost hard to keep up with everything. And I mean that in the best possible sense. I hope you all got as much out of the meeting as I did, and were able to take advantage of some of the unique aspects of our remote meeting format (watching talks in pj’s while eating pizza anyone?!).

Remarkably, it was a pretty normal year in terms of the number of DEE-related regular session posters and talks. We also had 11 finalists who gave poster and talk presentations in the DEE Best Student Presentation award competition, the Huey Award. The presentations were all fantastic! Congratulations to Huey Award winner Alex Mauro (talk) and Jameel Moore (poster). Also many thanks to Christine Miller, the incoming DEE Secretary, for serving as session chair for this event.

The Beer and Brains social was a little different this year, but thanks to mastermind Craig Marshall, the DEE Student/Post-doc Rep (I’m still not sure how to do half the things he made happen with the breakout rooms in Zoom!), we were still able to catch up and talk science and job advice. Thanks to all of our mentors and participants for engaging in the social even this year.

The special symposium to honor George Gilchrist also involved many folks from DEE and was a great remembrance of George’s lasting impacts on physiological and evolutionary biology; his dedicated effort and impact at the National Science Foundation; and his pragmatic advice for early career researchers. Last, but not least, we had six DEE-related symposia in the 2021 meeting. These symposia covered a large range of topics that highlight the diversity of scientific questions and approaches encompassed by DEE. We had a couple of genomics-themed symposia across diverse groups from manakins to mollusks. We also had symposia on artificial light at night (ALAN) impacts on organisms; spatio-temporal variation in behavior; integrative biology of pigment organelles; and the biology of sticky substances.

DEE will again be sponsoring a number of symposia for the 2022 meeting (7, in fact) on topics including ecoimmunology, phenological plasticity, metabolic scaling and DNA metabarcoding, just to name a few. Keep an eye out to bookmark these great symposia on your 2022 SICB schedule next year.

Finally, the programming committee is back to symposium proposal review mode, so get those ideas together and let your DEE DPOs know what you’re thinking. I’m happy to discuss whether it’s at the idea stage or a full proposal that you’d like feedback on prior to submission. The proposal deadline will be in late summer 2021 for the January 2023 meeting.

Best wishes,

Sarah Diamond

 

Message from the Program Officer-Elect

Martha Muñoz, DPOElect.DEE@sicb.org 

Martha Muñoz

Hello, DEE! I’m delighted to be your new Program Officer-Elect for the division and am honored to continue the incredible programming that Sarah Diamond supports for the division. Before anything else, I want to thank Sarah for everything she’s been doing in DEE for the past two years. Thank you, Sarah!

While SICB 2021 could not be held in person, we were not lacking for access to great science. Symposia supported by DEE were central to the successful 2021 meeting. In particular, DEE co-sponsored six symposia that, together, spanned a correspondingly wide swath of ecological and evolutionary themes. A major theme from these supported symposia is the infusion of genomics perspectives into organismal studies. For example, DEE supported genomics-themed symposia on manakins and mollusks, with particular emphasis on how genomic perspectives can enhance our understanding of organismal evolution. Other major themes include organismal responses to artificial light at night, spatiotemporal variation in organismal behavior, the integrative biology of pigment organelles, and the biology of sticky substances. I hope that you had a chance to enjoy one or more of these symposia during the SICB meeting, and I would like to thank all the organizers and speakers for an exemplary job, and all under challenging and unusual circumstances. SICB is resilient!

Speaking of DEE-supported symposia, I wanted to also share some thoughts from our Special Session to honor the life and legacy of Dr. George Gilchrist. Former DEE Chair, Cam Ghalambor, and I were fortunate enough to co-organize the session, which resulted in a dozen presentations (some with multiple contributors) and drew in many more attendees. The scientific talks were all superb, and the warmth and sense of celebration was tangible. We wrapped up the session, in the spirit of George, with a toast to life. I would like to thank Beth Brainerd and Jake Socha (outgoing SICB President and PO, respectively) for helping us plan and execute this special session. Without their generosity and support it would not have been so successful. I want to also thank Burk Associates, who joined us all day on a Saturday to ensure that our session went off without any hitches. Likewise, I want to express my gratitude to all of our speakers/contributors. These are (with speakers underlined): Joel Kingsolver, Lauren Buckley, Sarah Diamond, Chris Muir, Seema Sheth, Amy Angert, Don Miles, Howard Snell, Heidi Snell, Paul Stone, Cam Ghalambor, Alisha Shah, Andrea Landeira-Dabarca, Amanda Rugenski, Andrea Encalada, Steve Thomas, Alex Flecker, LeRoy Poff, Alex Gunderson, Carol Lee, Kristi Montooth, Ibrahim El-Shesheny, Omera Matoo, John DeLong, Sam Scheiner, Doug Levey, Paco Moore, Simon Malcomber, Bill Zamer, Chris Schneider, Leslie Rissler, Brian Sidlauskas, Carlos Botero, J. Gordon Burleigh, Einat Hazkani-Covo, Jenny McGuire, Julie Meachen, Brian O’Meara, Trina Roberts, Juan Santos, Craig McClain, and Ray Huey. Thank you so much! We will continue to miss George, but it was heartening to see that his legacy is alive and strong in SICB. Long may it stay that way.

Although SICB 2021 only just wrapped up, it’s certainly not too early to look ahead! SICB 2022, which will be held in Phoenix, Arizona, will host seven DEE-supported symposia. These are:

  1. The deep and shallow history of aquatic life’s passages between marine and freshwater habitats (Organizers: Eric Schultz and Lisa Park-Boush)
  2. Ecoimmunology: what unconventional organisms tell us after two decades (Organizers: Vania Assis and Stefanny Monteiro)
  3. Lesser known transitions: organismal form and function across abiotic gradients (Organizers: Charlotte Easterling, Mary Kate O’Donnell, and Matthew Kolmann)
  4. Causal mechanisms of interspecific metabolic scaling patterns (Organizers: Jon Harrison and Meghan Duell)
  5. Phenological plasticity: From molecular mechanisms to ecological and evolutionary implications (Organizers: Cory Williams and Lise Aubry)
  6. DNA metabarcoding across disciplines: sequencing our way to greater understanding across scales of biological organization (Organizers: Anna Forsman, Michelle Gaither, and Anna Savage)
  7. Reciprocal illumination between ecology and biomechanics: evolution, integration, and constraint (Lara Ferry and Tim Higham)

In the spirit of DEE, these symposia cover such a wide range of organismal biology, ecology, and evolution. I hope you’re excited for all the excellent science to come! Thank you to all the organizers and the speakers, whose symposia will greatly enrich SICB 2022 and beyond.

Speaking of symposia, SICB 2023 is closer than you think! We are soliciting symposia proposals in anticipation of our planning meeting in October 2021. If you’re interested in organizing a symposium, send me an email! DEE wants to support cutting-edge science at conceptual and empirical vanguards. Symposia offer opportunities to connect among ideas, create emergent knowledge, and push fields forward. In addition, they’re great opportunities for collaboration, connection, and networking, perhaps especially for early career researchers. If the process feels intimidating or daunting, worry not! I’m here to help. I have experience in all the aspects of planning and execution and would happily guide you through any and all pressure points or issues. My job is to help DEE support the best science, so it is my honor to help our members prepare their symposia proposals. I would like to especially extend an invitation to our early career members and reiterate SICB’s message of equity and inclusion. We want our symposia to reflect our diverse membership. Please feel free to reach out at any time! I can be reached at my DEE PO email address, and also at martha.munoz@yale.edu.

 

Message from the Secretary

Christine Miller, Secretary.DEE@sicb.org

Christine Miller

First, I’d like to express gratitude to our outgoing DEE Secretary, the Martha Muñoz. Martha has been a champion of DEE and contributes so much to the society. I’m glad that I will now get a chance to work with Martha side-by-side in her role as Program Officer.

Apply for our Huey Awards for best talk and poster: We had some incredible talks and posters as part of the DEE Best Student Paper/Poster competitions this year. A huge thank you to all the presenters. I always seek out these sessions because I know they will be riveting, and I was once again impressed this year. Please encourage your friends, students, and undergraduate researchers to look out for this opportunity when submitting work for SICB 2022. It would be fabulous to keep up this high level of accomplishment. The (very) hard part is picking the winners. A hearty congratulations this year to Alex Mauro and Jameel Moore.

Chondrocera laticornis (Hemiptera: Coreidae) on its host plant. Photo by Christine Miller

Would you like to be on DEE’s social media team? DEE is stepping up our engagement on social media! We are building a social media team and would love your help. Read more in DEE Postdoctoral Rep Anusha Shankar’s post below.  I’d also love to hear from you if you have an announcement or opportunity to share on social media or the fall newsletter.

Let’s highlight our early-career members: We would like to highlight undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers in our Fall 2021 newsletter. Please send me nominations in these next few months so I can start preparing!

Red-wing blackbird, Agelaius phoeniceus. Photo by Fran Bonier

Photographs, paintings, and more: Art and science are an incredible pairing. We are looking for visual art inspired by ecology and evolution, and the process of doing science, for the Fall 2021 DEE newsletter. Would you like to share some of your work with the community? If so, I look forward to hearing from you.

Please vote in the upcoming SICB Election: All SICB members, including students, are eligible and encouraged to vote in the upcoming SICB election. In addition to candidates for Society-Wide positions, you will be able to vote on DEE Secretary Elect. You can read more below about the DEE Secretary-Elect candidates below; the SICB-wide newsletter contains candidate biographies for Society-wide positions.

Minutes from the SICB Division of Ecology and Evolution Business Meeting in January 2021 are available online.

Message from the Student/Postdoctoral Affairs Committee Representative

Anusha Shankar, anusha.shankar@cornell.edu 

Anusha Shankar

I am excited to be your new DEE graduate/postdoc representative for SICB 2022! I am a postdoc at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and I study avian physiology, and am embarking on a project to integrate gene expression and physiology to study metabolic states in hummingbirds. I’m Indian, and I love salsa dancing. I look forward to maybe meeting you all in person sometime soon! But until then, we would love to engage with you all throughout the year and facilitate your interactions and collaborations even outside of the meeting. To make that happen, I’d encourage you to join our Facebook group (SICB Division of Ecology and Evolution), follow us on Twitter (@SICB_DEE), and/or join our new Slack workspace (SICB Division of Ecology and Evolution). We would also love to post more content from student and postdoctoral DEE members on social media – if you’d like to be involved in that initiative, you can get in touch with me or DEE Secretary Christine Miller. And tag @SICB_DEE on twitter when you have a new paper out; we will re-tweet and help share your research! If you have any questions or are looking for additional information about DEE and ways that you can become more involved, please email me. I look forward to hearing from you so we can work together to make SICB 2022 rewarding, memorable, and fun!

 

Raymond B. Huey Best Student Presentation Awards

It’s our pleasure to announce the winners of the fifth annual Raymond B. Huey Best Student Presentation Awards:

Alex Mauro

Best oral presentation, Alex Mauro, Colorado State University. How tradeoffs constrain evolvability at the range limit of the Trinidadian guppy.

Broadly, I study the evolutionary ecology of range limits. I study range limits to investigate the limits of the adaptive process because the better we understand these limitations, the better we can predict how organisms will respond to future change. During my dissertation, I have investigated how a trade-off between salinity tolerance and competition constrains Trinidadian Guppies to freshwater in Trinidad despite their ability to persist in brackish water in other parts of their range. Through a combination of field studies, breeding experiments, and physiological experiments in the lab, my collaborators and I have found strong evidence that the physiological network underpinning the trade-off is a reason why the trade-off serves as a barrier to both range expansion and niche expansion in guppies. I am currently finishing my PhD in the Ghlambor Lab at Colorado State University. For more information on this research, see my website (https://amaurobio.weebly.com/) or follow me on twitter (@evoevoalex).

 

Best poster presentation, Jameel Moore, Benedict College. Interactive effects of ecologically relevant temperature regimes and p,p’-DDE exposure on patterns of gonadal gene expression in the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis).

Jameel Moore

Jameel Moore is a senior undergraduate at Benedict College majoring in biology with aspirations of becoming a Pediatric Surgeon. He is a Founder Scholar recipient and a proud member of Kappa Alpha Psi. He is also the Founder and President of the Minority Association of Pre-medical Students chapter at Benedict College. He encompasses himself in leadership, academic excellence and community service. He has served as a research technician for the United States Department of Energy and NASA South Carolina Grant Consortium and a few other notable institutions. He also serves as a change agent completing over 100 hours of mission and service trips in Port-au-prince Haiti, United Arab of Emirates and South Africa.

Jameel Moore working in the field

In the face of a rapidly changing global climate, it is important to understand how thermal fluctuations and contaminant exposure interact to influence wildlife health. At the U.S Department of Energy Savannah River Site Ecology Lab I studied the effects that the environmental contaminants p,p. DDE has on embryonic development in the American alligator at different temperature fluctuations. In particular, species with temperature-dependent sex determination may be especially vulnerable to these man-made influences due to their sensitivity to the environment during development. Alligators are among those species with temperature-dependent sex determination and play an important role in maintaining ecosystem balance. Sitting at the top of the food chain, alligators are apex predators and help keep other animal populations in balance. My role was to preform dissections and extract DNA and RNA from organs that contributed to sex phenotypes to those that include the gonadal adrenomesenephro complex, cliteropenis and the brain etc. In addition, I was to conduct data analysis during alligator nest captures in the swamps and tall grass of South Carolina and Florida. In summary, this project provided a larger understanding of how changes in temperature regimes associated with climate change and exposure to environmental contaminants are affecting alligators and their other important ecological implications.

 

Congratulations to these outstanding students and to all of the finalists! It is not too early to consider applying for this presti­gious award for the 2022 meeting in Phoenix. You can find the application guidelines here.

 

Candidates for Secretary-Elect

Alex R. Gunderson 

Alex Gunderson

Current Position: Assistant Professor, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Tulane University

Education: BS, Minnesota State University. MS, The College of William and Mary. PhD, Duke University

SICB Activities: Member for 12 years (2009)

Other Memberships: Society for the Study of Evolution

Research Interests: Physiological and evolutionary ecology

Goals Statement : I began attending SICB early in graduate school, and it immediately became the meeting at which I felt most at home. This was partly because of the incredible science, and partly because I felt the society placed such a clear emphasis on providing space to young scientists. My primary goal as Secretary of DEE will be to continue emphasizing the important work of mentoring the next generation of EE researchers, and ensuring that we do so in a way that is inclusive and equitable.

 

Ryan L. Earley

Ryan Earley

Current Position: Associate Professor of Biological Sciences, University of Alabama

Education: B.S. Syracuse University (1997), Ph.D. University of Louisville (2002); Postdoc, Center for Behavioral Neuroscience & Georgia State University (2006)

Professional Experience: Assistant Professor, CSU-Fresno (2006-2008); Assistant – Associate Professor, University of Alabama (2008-present)

SICB Activities: Member for 15 years (2006); Associate Editor of Integrative & Comparative Biology (2015-present); Student Support Committee member (2012-15) and Chair (2015-18); Developed Student Grant (GIAR/FGST) Workshop; DEE Beers & Brains Mixer participant (2018); Student presentation judge for DEE, DCE, DAB, and DCPB.

Other Memberships: Society for the Study of Evolution; Pan-American Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology; Sigma Xi.

Research Interests: Evolution of behavioral and endocrine stress responses; neuroendocrine mechanisms underlying social behavior and sexual plasticity; evolution of sex change; evolutionary consequences of endocrine disruption; physiological tolerance to extreme environments; fish geek.

Statement of Goals: I am honored to have been nominated for DEE’s Secretary-elect position. After attending my first SICB conference, I was hooked. I could randomly waltz into any meeting session and be mesmerized by creative science, which really resonated with me. I feel that the diverse scholarly approaches to fundamental questions in biology is a unique strength, if not the hallmark, of our society. Our brilliant students experience the power of integration and interdisciplinary collaboration and are immersed in an environment where joy is derived from discovery and from going out on a limb (or fin) to satisfy intellectual curiosities. As an Associate Editor of ICB, I have become intimately familiar with the research breadth of our society. As Student Support Committee Chair, I felt the future pulse of our Society and can confidently say that, with continued investment in our student members, SICB will remain at the forefront of innovation in biology. I have great respect and admiration for the research being conducted by investigators in each of our Divisions, and I think the most thrilling part of science is attempting to put the biological jigsaw together. I am thus committed to fostering strong communication among DEE’s diverse members and to building upon existing connections with other Divisions and with our journal editorial boards. I look forward to showcasing DEE’s accomplishments in our newsletters and learning more about the intricacies of our Society in my capacity as an officer. I am excited to serve DEE and await the chance to see you all at our next meeting.

Spring 2021: Division of Invertebrate Zoology

Message from the Chair

Jon Allen, Chair.DIZ@sicb.org

Dear DIZ,

The stauromedusa (or stalked jellyfish) Haliclystus sanjuanensis. Photo Credit: Jon Allen

Hello from a very spring-like Virginia! As I write this I am working from home, largely exiled to my deck while my children and wife occupy the new home office spaces that we have spent the last year creating and refining. The good news is that my deck is much more hospitable now that we have officially entered into spring and I can hear the birds (aka invertebrate consumers) singing and watch the yard getting greener by the second. It gives me a sense of hope that 2021 has better days in store for us all.

I am also heartened by what I thought was a very successful virtual meeting. We had a large number of talks and posters in DIZ and an extended time in which to view them. While I don’t want to be forced to repeat this entirely virtual meeting again (seeing you all is the best part!), I think there were some things that may get incorporated for the future that can enhance even in-person meetings. If you found something particularly wonderful or engaging about the format this year that you think could be carried forward, please reach out and let me know. I am sure the Executive Committee will be eager to hear your feedback.

I know that we all want to extend a heartfelt thank you to Ken Halanych, our out-going DIZ Chair. Ken’s leadership was especially important this past year of course, as we saw so many unexpected changes to the format and administration of the annual meeting. But Ken’s leadership also helped us usher in a new way to select and honor our best student presentations. Those changes seem like a lifetime ago now, but they were a critical change to the way DIZ operates. I look forward to being able to thank Ken in person in January 2022!

In the Fall newsletter Ken mentioned that we are transitioning the Chair of the Libbie Hyman Scholarship committee from Jennifer Burnaford to Abigail Cahill. We are extraordinarily lucky to have had Jennifer serve as the Chair of this committee and deliver awards to so many students. We are also lucky that Jennifer volunteered to help bridge the award process this year and get Abigail up to speed on the way things run. That was especially important in a year of so many other upheavals.

Speaking of Libbie Hyman, many of you will remember that the auction in 2019 (run by Abigail Cahill) was a tremendous success in raising funds for the scholarship fund. It is time to step up to the plate once again. We are actively seeking someone to step forward and Chair the auction committee for the 2022 meeting. We are also, of course, looking for folks who may be willing to donate items to auction off! If you have an interest in helping to perform this important role in the division, please get in touch with me or with our divisional secretary, Justin McAlister. We need your help!

Lastly, it is election season! We have two excellent nominees to replace Justin McAlister as Divisional Secretary. Justin will serve through the end of the 2022 meeting, which means we need to vote this spring on a new Secretary to learn the ropes from Justin and take over next January. The two nominees for this year are Dr. Kelly Dorgan at Dauphin Island Sea Lab and Dr. Christina Zakas at North Carolina State University. Both are familiar faces at SICB, but you can learn more about them and their backgrounds at the end of this newsletter. We are always looking for new folks to get involved in DIZ leadership. If you would like to be considered in the future for a nomination, please let me know!

Jon

 

Message from the Program Officer

Karen Chan, DPO.DIZ@sicb.org

Hello invertebrate enthusiasts.

What a year it has been! While we did not meet in person in Washington D.C. in January, I have enjoyed learning from you during our extended virtual conference. There is something nice about being able to watch all your amazing talks “on-demand.” Thank you for participating and working with us during these challenging times. If you would like to send us feedback, you can send me an email.

Another big thank you to our student presenters and our volunteer judges who worked through a brand-new format of presentation and judging. Our esteemed panel members included Anne Boettger, Abigail Cahill, Elizabeth Davis-Berg, Rick Hochberg, Jan Pechenik, Robert Podolsky, Adam Reitzel, Robert Thacker, Janice Voltzow, and Christina Zakas. We transitioned to a new Best Student Presentation format in 2021 with all the best oral presentations in a single session. I appreciate all of you who attended the session live. Please also join me to congratulate our winners.

The winner of the Mary Rice Best Oral Contribution is Emily Branam, “Biomechanical role of dorsal thoracic spine in swimming of barnacle nauplii.”

Runner-up: Julia Notar, “A living shag rug: Sea urchin spine density differs by habitat and has consequences for vision.

The winner of the Alan Kohn Best Student Poster is: Joseph Mack, “From mud to meat: Employing phylogenetics and metabarcoding gut-content analyses to test evolutionary hypotheses of trophic transitions in a group of predatory annelids”.

Runner up:  Michael Drummond, “A new species of bioluminescent ostracod from the reefs of Carrie Bow Caye, Belize (Ostracoda: Myodocopida: Cypridinidae).

As we look forward to meeting in person in Phoenix in 2022. I am also happy to share with you that we will be organizing a special contributed session to celebrate the life of Prof. ‪John S. Pearse. Please consider contributing a paper to honor this  inspirational scientist in our field. We are also going to sponsor four exciting symposia. They are:

  • The deep and shallow history of aquatic life’s passages between marine and freshwater habitats
  • Lesser known transitions: organismal form and function across abiotic gradients
  • Open source solutions in experimental design
  • DNA metabarcoding across disciplines: sequencing our way to greater understanding across scales of biological organization

If you have an idea for a symposium, I am here to help you turn it into a reality for 2023. Send me an email and I will provide you with more details about the application process and suggestions for successful proposals.

I hope you continue to find 2021 intellectually stimulating, rewarding, and successful.

Regards,

Karen Chan

 

Message from the Secretary

Justin McAlister, secretary.diz@sicb.org

Dear members of the DIZ,

Crazy carny or dedicated invertebrate biologist spawning corals? Photo Credit: Justin McAlister

If ever there was a year when invertophiles could find solace spending time with the invertebrate loves of our lives it was 2020. I suspect that if nothing else could be relied upon in this tumultuous year, you knew that your favorite little critters were going about their daily business without the slightest knowledge (or care) about our COVID pandemic. And within that, I hope you found a bit of comfort – I know that I certainly did! A high note for me: I spent late-July and early August of 2020 spawning corals (Astrangia poculata) on my back patio and in my basement, which I converted into a makeshift lab. Good times, good times!

In sad news, we lost our dear friend, mentor, and colleague, Dr. John Pearse, this past year. I hope you were able to participate in the simultaneous tide-pooling experience that was set up to honor his memory. I had a chance to chat with John on several occasions over the years at conferences and he was always encouraging and excited to talk about invertebrates. As Karen mentioned in her update, DIZ is planning a special symposium session to remember John. We’ll keep you posted as plans develop and I encourage you to consider participating.

John and Vicki Pearse with Maria Byrne at the 8th North American Echinoderm Conference in 2017. Photo Credit: Justin McAlister

In happier news, our 2021 Virtual Annual Meeting was a success and I hope we’ll be able to keep our favorite parts of it going forward into the future. Our DIZ business (member’s) meeting (also virtual) was well-attended, and the meeting minutes are available here.

This year we will hold elections for our next DIZ Secretary, who will take the reins from me at the conclusion of the next Annual Meeting (2022 in Phoenix!). We have the following two excellent candidates for you to choose from: Dr. Kelly Dorgan from Dauphin Island Sea Lab and Dr. Christina Zakas from North Carolina State University. Please find more information about these candidates at the end of this newsletter.

The Northern Star Coral, Astrangia poculata, spawning eggs. Photo Credit: Justin McAlister

As Jon mentioned, Jennifer Burnaford will be stepping down from her long-held post overseeing the Libbie Hyman Scholarship committee. My understanding is that she served in this position for 10+ years! Be sure to thank Jennifer the next time you see her! On behalf of numerous DIZ Officers over your long tenure, thank you, Jennifer!

I hope that 2021 will provide you with new opportunities to share your love of invertebrates. Please contact me if you have exciting or interesting news to share and I’ll be sure to pass it along to our members.

 

 

Sincerely,

Justin

 

Message from Student and Postdoctoral Affairs Committee Representative

Rebecca Varney, rvarney@crimson.ua.edu

Rebecca Varney

Snail Mail (Literally)

We just passed the one-year mark of the pandemic. For an entire year, many of us have been shut out of our labs, forced to work at odd hours, hoping for a vaccine to become available. For a year, I think many of us have faced a lot of uncertainty, and it is easy to feel somehow less entitled to care about “small things” as we watch peers’ research programs struggle. But most of us study small things for a living, so perhaps we can all agree that small things make a big difference.

I have been fortunate because my pandemic isolation-home has been near the water. My former master’s advisor lives here, and he messaged me a month after quarantine began. “I have measured my canoe carefully, and the seats are just over 6 feet apart.” It wasn’t long before our relief in being outdoors became “what can we do?”. So, we started asking friends, collaborators, and perfect strangers what samples could be gathered from the Gulf Coast.

I have collected 17 species for others so far (6 phyla), and I only know one of the scientists personally. Shrimp were mailed to two places in Texas, where they contributed to a PhD project related to range mapping. Starfish are currently regenerating arms and gorging on shrimp pellets. Annelids went to a different lab in Florida. I caught a fishing spider! In a terrestrial twist, a fully intact beaver skeleton got picked up by a local mammologist (related: giving directions via kayak is not my strength, and GPS coordinates are a must). And I mailed snail shells 5,000 miles!

So many of these samples were addressed to people’s houses. I knew I wasn’t the only one with a microscope on my kitchen table, but … wow. You are all incredible, and the work you are doing under such limiting circumstances is inspiring. So many of you have colonies of snails growing in your kitchen, fishtanks full of worms in your living rooms, and one of you is keeping a large number of crayfish in a spare bathtub. I’ve seen parts of museum collections in pantries, and more than once I’ve seen some rather large computers in dining rooms (in their defense, the VPNs never stay connected, we all know). You all have persisted in achieving research goals despite the challenges, and new projects have started in part because of the strange circumstances.

To send samples around the globe, I’ve spent a lot of time reading import/export laws and permits to make sure everything was legal! But collecting for random scientists has become one of my bright spots of joy. It has become a pastime that gets me outside (masked; surgical or SCUBA, depending), and I feel able to maybe make a small difference for somebody who can’t access their study animals right now. I don’t know most of them, but we are all scientists. And, wrapping snail shells in bubble wrap, even though I haven’t met anybody new in person for over a year, I get to feel connected to the very special community that is all of you.

Stay well!

Rebecca Varney

 

Left: Marsh snails in Florida. Empty shells were sent to Europe. Center: The coast of Pensacola, Florida, as seen from canoe.  Right: An almost emerged dragonfly that was sent to a researcher in another part of Florida.  All photo credits: Rebecca Varney.

 

Message from the Libbie Hyman Scholarship Committee Chair

Jennifer Burnaford, Chair, Libbie H. Hyman Memorial Scholarship Committee

Applications for the 2021 Libbie H. Hyman Memorial Scholarship were due on 4 February. Applications were reviewed by a three-person committee: Dr. Will Jaeckle, Dr. Shanna Hanes, and Dr. Abigail Cahill. This committee awarded funds to two recipients for in-person field station experiences during the Summer 2021 field season.

We awarded a $664 scholarship to John Deitsch to support his research experience at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire, USA. John is in his third year as an undergraduate at Cornell University, working in the lab of Dr. Sara Kaiser. John’s research, which is partially supported through the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Hubbard Brook Field Ornithology Program, will focus on the effects of pollution from artificial light at night (ALAN) on predation and parasitism pressure on caterpillars. The results from his study will provide insight into how quickly arthropod communities change in response to ALAN, how low-level illumination affects predation and parasitism pressure on caterpillars, and whether parasitoids congregate around light sources.

We awarded $3990 to Taylor Naquin to support participation in the Marine Invertebrate Zoology course at the University of Washington Friday Harbor Laboratories. Taylor will be starting in the Fall as a graduate student in the lab of Jennifer Burnaford at California State University Fullerton. Taylor has a broad background in marine ecology, and this course will give her an opportunity to increase her depth of knowledge of marine invertebrates, with a comprehensive analysis of diversity and morphology that will establish a solid foundation for her graduate work.

As always, I would like to acknowledge the exceptional team which makes the application and award process move smoothly, with thanks to Will Jaeckle, Shanna Hanes, and Abigail Cahill for their thoughtful and thorough review of applications and SICB Webmaster Ruedi Birenheide for all of his work with the webpage and application logistics.

This round of applications and this Spring 2021 newsletter entry marks the end of my tenure as the Chair of the LHH scholarship committee after 10 years of service. I have thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to be a part of this committee, and to work with an exceptionally dedicated group of invertebrate biologists who are committed to supporting students in their scholarly endeavors. The LHH award is truly unique and thus very special. I am thrilled to turn over the position of committee Chair to Abigail Cahill – stay tuned for news from her in the Fall!

The Libbie H. Hyman Award provides funding to support the first significant field station experience for advanced undergraduates or early career graduate students pursuing coursework or research on invertebrates. This first field station experience is typically a transformative period in the career and life of a student. We deeply appreciate the donations which allow us to support these experiences. As the costs associated with summer field station experiences continue to rise, we are always happy to accept contributions to the Scholarship Fund so that we can increase the amount of support to these deserving students. To contribute, click on Donate to SICB on the SICB home page or send a check to:

SICB Business Office
Libbie H. Hyman Memorial Scholarship Fund
1313 Dolley Madison Blvd., Suite 402
McLean, VA 22101

Checks should be made payable to SICB and marked as a “Contribution to the Libbie H. Hyman Memorial Scholarship Fund.” All contributions are tax deductible. Thanks for your help!

The egg mass of a Dirona pellucida, as laid on a glass bowl in Jon Allen’s lab at FHL – clearly marking it as safe for embryological work! Photo Credit: Jon Allen

Candidates for Divisional Secretary

Kelly Dorgan 

Kelly Dorgan

Current position: Senior Marine Scientist II, Dauphin Island Sea Lab, AL; Associate Professor of Marine Sciences, University of South Alabama

Education: B.S. University of California Santa Cruz (2001); Ph.D. University of Maine (2007)

Professional Experience: Senior Marine Scientist I-II, Dauphin Island Sea Lab, AL (2013-present); Assistant-Associate Professor of Marine Sciences, University of South Alabama (2014-present); Postdoctoral Researcher, Scripps Institution of Oceanography (2011-2013); Postdoctoral Researcher, University of California Berkeley (2007-2010)

SICB activities: Member (~15 years), recipient of the Carl Gans award (DCB, 2012)

Other memberships: Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation, American Association of Underwater Sciences

Research interests: Animal-sediment interactions; polychaete functional morphology; biomechanics and energetics of burrowing; sediment ecology

Goals Statement: I have been an enthusiastic participant in SICB meetings for years and am excited about this opportunity to contribute to DIZ and learn more about how SICB is run. For more than half of my life, I have been fascinated by the diverse and bizarre morphologies, behaviors and life history strategies of invertebrates. Every time I come to a SICB meeting, I find inspiration to take my research in new directions, to introduce students to the mysteries of invertebrates, and to build relationships with creative and interesting people. As a graduate student, and then as a postdoc and new faculty member bringing students to SICB, I have appreciated how welcoming and inclusive the society is to students. As a newly tenured faculty member in a state with a long and complicated history in the civil rights movement at a time in which we as a country are poised to make significant advances toward racial equity, I am eager to learn from and contribute to SICB’s efforts towards broadening participation in science.

 

Christina Zakas 

Christina Zakas

Current Position: Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Science, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC

Education: BS in Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2004); PhD in Genetics, University of Georgia (2011)

Professional Experience: Assistant Professor, North Carolina State University (2019-present); Postdoctoral Fellow, New York University (2012-2019); Whitman Visiting Fellow at the Marine Biological Labs (2019, 2021)

SICB Activities: Member and presenter since 2010 in DIZ and DEDB

Other memberships: Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution, Pan-American Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology, Genetics Society of America

Research Interests: Life-history Evolution, EvoDevo, Developmental Genetics, Marine Larvae

Goals Statement: I first came to SICB as an early graduate student and while my research since has spanned the fields of Evolutionary Ecology, Genetics, and Development, I’ve had SICB and DIZ as a common thread throughout. I am happy to support the integrative community in DIZ, and I am excited about the opportunity to connect researchers in different fields who work on amazing invertebrate systems. I believe I can contribute new ideas for building resources in the division and the broader community.

Spring 2021: Division of Neurobiology, Neuroethology, and Sensory Biology

Message from the Chair

James Newcomb, chair.dnnsb@sicb.org

It is the end of March, which means that the snow is nearly gone, and mud season is kicking into high gear here in the northeastern US. It is also hard to believe that we are less than a month removed from the 2021 SICB meeting, with the extended virtual setting running until the end of February. What a meeting! The SICB Executive Committee deserves much thanks for being able to organize and execute a virtual meeting that, while not the same as an in-person meeting, still managed to run amazingly smoothly and provide an interactive setting for scientific discourse. Participation was up and I appreciated the attendance of many colleagues and students from around the world that may not have been able to join us in Washington, DC.

DNNSB co-sponsored three major symposia this year and we encourage DNNSB members to consider proposing symposia for upcoming SICB meetings. We also had a full slate of contributed talks and posters. Thank you to all of the people who volunteered to chair sessions, judge presentations, and help contribute to making this meeting memorable, indeed.

We had another strong group of speakers for our Best Student Presentation (BSP) talks and posters. Please join me in congratulating our 2021 BSP winners, Whitney Walkowski (Louisiana State University; oral) and Tobias Niebur (Georgia Institute of Technology; poster), and the 2021 BSP Honorable Mentions, Marissa McDonald (University of Hawaii, Manoa; oral) and Gabriela Bosque Ortiz (Yale University; poster).

In this year’s election, we will be voting for DNNSB Secretary, to start after the end of the 2022 annual meeting. Lisa Mangiamele has served in this role for almost a decade and I cannot thank her enough for all of the time and effort that she has contributed during that period. Next year we will be having an election for the DNNSB Program Officer, so please let me know if you are interested in serving in that position.

 

Message from the Program Officer

Jeff Riffell, dpo.dnnsb@sicb.org

The 2021 Virtual Meeting

We had a great virtual meeting this year! Jake Socha, our fantastic SICB-wide Program Officer, played an instrumental role in enabling the virtual meeting.

Also, a big shout-out to Kim Hoke and Nathan Morehouse for their fantastic symposium “Spatiotemporal dynamics of animal communication“, and Karen Muraska and Julie Butler’s symposium on “Sending and Receiving Signals: Endocrine Modulation of Social Communication“.  DNNSB was the major sponsor of both symposia. We also co-sponsored several other excellent symposia, including “Physical Mechanisms of Behavior” hosted by Patrick Green and Alejandro Rico-Guevara, and “Blinded by the Light: Effects of Light Pollution across Diverse Natural Systems,” organized by Meredith Kernbach and colleagues.

A big thank you for virtually attending DNNB’s Best Student Presentations and Posters! Each year our the number of applications increases, and this reflects the growth in our division.  But please remember to encourage your students to apply. The application is easy (just a check-box). And of course, thanks to everyone for participating and sharing your work!

 Symposia for the 2022 Meeting – Phoenix, AZ

DNNSB will co-sponsor several symposia at the 2022 meeting, including “Phenological Plasticity: from Molecular Mechanisms to Ecological and Evolutionary Implications,” and “The deep and shallow history of aquatic life’s passages between marine and freshwater habitats.”  There are several other symposia that we are also co-sponsoring, including SICB-wide symposia “Open source solutions in experimental design,” “DNA metabarcoding across disciplines,” and “Causal mechanisms of interspecific metabolic scaling patterns.” Please keep an eye out for symposium details on the SICB meeting site.

 Submit Proposals for Symposia and Workshops for the 2023 Meeting in Austin, TX

Proposals for symposia for the 2023 meeting in Austin are due August 20th, 2021. If you have an excellent idea for a symposium, I urge you to submit a proposal. Moreover, please contact me, Jim, or Maryam if you want feedback about your ideas. The call for proposals can be found at this site, and the guidelines for the process of developing proposals can be found here.

Submitting a proposal is not difficult, although it does require some planning and organization. The breadth of DNNSB continues to grow, and we’d like the symposia to reflect that breadth. Not surprisingly, given our scope, we co-sponsor many symposia. Nonetheless, we would still appreciate having symposia that have DNNSB as a focus. And if there are hot/developing topics that should be a symposium topic, please let us know.

Another mechanism for featuring emerging research areas are Workshops. A Workshop can be scheduled the day before the meeting and provides impetus to bring new people who typically do not attend SICB. If you have an idea for a Workshop, even one for Washington DC, please contact me and Jake Socha (Chair Program Committee).

Looking Forward…We continue to have great discussions on ways to increase DNNSB membership. Please encourage your friends and colleagues about the benefits of being a SICB member and attending the annual meeting. SICB is a fantastic meeting for students and postdocs, and a mechanism to showcase interdisciplinary and forward-looking symposia.

In addition, I will be leaving the DNNSB’s Program Officer post next year, so if you have any interest in participating in the development of symposia for SICB as a Program Officer, please let Jim Newcomb know. Being the DNNSB PO is a great opportunity. Our division forms a natural bridge between disciplines (behavior, endocrinology, development, biomechanics, ecology, and the list goes on) – as such, DNNSB symposia often gain SICB-wide support. Moreover, our division is growing, so the DNNSB Program Officer provides an opportunity to showcase research in these growing areas.

 

Message from the Secretary

Lisa Mangiamele, secretary.dnnsb@sicb.org

Business Meeting Minutes from SICB 2021

Our division’s business meeting minutes are posted on the SICB website shortly after the annual meeting each year. If you missed them, you can find them here.

Vote in the SICB Election in May

An important reminder about elections: our division is electing a new Secretary this year, so please see below for more information on the candidates and don’t forget to vote! Look for the link to the ballot at the top of the society-wide newsletter, and the election reminder email from SICB Headquarters in your inbox.

Communicating with Our Division’s Members

I am always working to keep members better informed about news and research going on within the Division. I maintain our Division’s Twitter feed at @SICB_DNNSB. I would especially like to use this platform to advertise the excellent research of our divisional members, so please tweet me at @SICB_DNNSB or email me at secretary.dnnsb@sicb.org if you would like your work highlighted.

 

Message from the Student/Postdoctoral Affairs Committee Representative

Maryam KamranKamran.mary@gmail.comTwitter: @merreyum

I hope everyone had a chance to participate in the virtual meeting earlier this year. It was really amazing to see it all come together and have a chance to see the wonderful work everyone has been doing. I wanted to remind our student and postdoc members that SPDAC has many resources that they can utilize. We have guides covering how to improve talks/posters, how to get into graduate school and academia, tips on grant writing and on how to prepare academic applications to name a few. We also hosted a Transferable skills workshop where we invited experts to talk about the skills from graduate school that helped them along the way. These experts were from a range of fields (NGOS, Think tanks, NOAA, National Parks Service/Resource Management,  Fisheries and Wildlife Agencies, Museums, Science Communication and Data Science).

I wanted to emphasize if anyone is interested in getting more involved or taking on this role to please let me know.

 

Best Student Presentation Awards

Best Oral Presentation Winner: Whitney Walkowski, Louisiana State University

Whitney Walkowski

Overall my research interests deal with how the physiology of an animal can influence its behavior. In particular, I am interested in how hormones act within the brain and peripheral sensory structures to drive mate choice behavior. The overarching goal of my work is to assess how these mate choice decisions could influence the evolution of species. My dissertation research focuses on the retina of various frog species. One of my focuses is how the retina of diurnal and nocturnal frog species differ on a morphological level. Another project concentrates on hormonal modulation of retinal sensitivity in the green treefrog (Hyla cinerea) using electrophysiological recordings. The final chapter of my dissertation aims to map spectral sensitivity across species to form a hypothesis on the evolution of frogs within the family of Dendrobatidae, poison dart frogs.

Honorable MentionMarissa McDonald (University of Hawaii, Manoa), “Visual physiology of larval stomatopod crustaceans”

Best Poster Presentation Winner: Tobias Niebur, Georgia Institute of Technology

Honorable Mention: Gabriela Bosque Ortiz (Yale University), “Hypothalamic POMC neural modulation of infant vocalization in Mice” 

 

Candidates for Secretary

Rachelle Belanger 

Rachelle Belanger

Current Position: Associate Professor and Assistant Chair of Biology, University of Detroit Mercy

Education: B.Sc. University of Windsor (2000), M.Sc. University of Windsor (2002), Ph.D. Bowling Green State University (2007)

Professional Experience: Postdoc, University of Alberta (2007-2009)

SICB Activities: Member since 2006; Regular participant as a student poster/oral presentation judge for Division of Neurobiology, Neuroethology, and Sensory Biology and Division of Animal Behavior

Other Memberships: Council for Undergraduate Research, Michigan Society for Neuroscience, Association of Biology Laboratory Educators, Association of College and University Biology Educators

Research Interests: Research in my lab examines the behavioral, neurological and physiological effects of contaminants on aquatic organisms, including fish and crayfish.

Goals Statement: I joined SICB as a graduate student in 2006 and have been regularly attending the annual meeting since I became a faculty member at the University of Detroit Mercy. As a graduate student, attending SICB, I always felt welcomed and supported when I gave both poster presentations and talks. Since joining SICB as a faculty member, I have continued to watch the society grow and increase its commitment to equity and inclusion of diverse scientists. As a faculty member, I now attend and bring my undergraduate student researchers to present their work at the conference annually. This conference and division really fosters a sense of inquiry and belonging. I plan to continue to help grow the division and make the division inclusive for both graduate and undergraduate student researchers. Planning more student activities, symposia and planning more seminars and scholar activities for division members are some of my goals as chair. I consider SICB to be my ‘home’ society, and I would be delighted to give back to the society by serving as the chair of the Division of Neurobiology, Neuroethology, and Sensory Biology.

 

Jessica Fox 

Jessica Fox

Current Position: Associate Professor, Case Western Reserve University

Education: B.S. Entomology, Cornell University, 2005; PhD, Neurobiology and Behavior, University of Washington, 2010.

Professional Experience: HHMI postdoctoral associate, UCLA 2011-2013; assistant professor, Case Western Reserve University, 2013-2019.

SICB Activities: Member since 2007; Affiliations with DNNSB, DAB, and DCB; Served as judge for DNNSB Best Student Presentation in multiple years; Organized symposium in 2018; Served on Carl Gans Award selection committee in 2020; Reviewer for Integrative and Comparative Biology

Other Memberships: Lifetime member of the International Society for Neuroethology

Research Interests: Research in my lab focuses on sensory information processing for locomotion. Using electrophysiology and quantitative analysis of behavior, we study how flies combine mechanosensory and visual information to guide flight and other behaviors.

Goals Statement: My first scientific conference was the 2007 SICB meeting in Phoenix, where I found a scientific community that was broad-ranging in interests, diverse in backgrounds, and welcoming to students. As a faculty member, I now bring my students to SICB each year, where they have presented research to inquisitive and encouraging colleagues. I intend to help the society maintain its commitment to promoting student research and providing a forum for developing scientists to present their work. I also hope to continue to increase the society’s diversity and ensure that meetings continue to be a place where new scientists can launch their careers.

Spring 2021: Division of Botany

Message from the Chair

Chris Martine, chair.dob@sicb.org

Chris Martine

Congrats to everyone on a great SICB 2021 conference. If you were unable to participate this year, we hope to see you next January for SICB 2022 (hopefully in-person) for the Division of Botany’s third official meeting! This year’s virtual conference had so many #SICBplants highlights for me, but the two that stood out the most were the “Rising Star in Organismal Botany” student session (more on that below) and the special DOB-sponsored session in honor of the late Vicki Funk, “Evolution and Biogeography of Islands.”

The Funk session featured talks by Angela McDonnell (Chicago Botanic Garden), Matthew Gibson (Indiana University), Jason Cantley (San Francisco State University), and John Phillips (University of Idaho) that were bookended by a touching introductory overview of Dr. Funk’s life and work by Warren Wagner (Smithsonian) and a final talk (coauthored by

Slide from Warren Wagner’s talk in the special session in honor of Vicki Funk

Vicki) by Sterling Keeley (University of Hawaii at Manoa) on the Compositae in Oceania. It was amazing to see so many of Vicki’s collaborators, friends, and admirers in attendance. With regard to Vicki’s lasting legacy as a scholar and mentor, Dr. Keeley probably put it best when she said that Vicki was the “hotspot” under the collaborative groups she was a part of and “all the little volcanoes that popped up were her progeny.” The lava was definitely flowing for this session – and it won’t cool for some time.

 

Message from the Program Officer

Janet Steven, dpo.dob@sicb.org

Janet Steven

Greetings from your Program Officer, Janet Steven. Thank you for supporting the Division at the virtual 2021 meetings. Despite the challenges of the virtual environment, we had many plant talks throughout the program, and our student talks and division mixer were collegial. Congratulations go out to Haley Branch, who received the Rising Star in Organismal Botany award, and Jenna Miladin, who received the award for best student poster presentation in the division.

SICB 2022 is currently scheduled for Phoenix, Arizona January 3-7, and the Society will provide periodic updates about planning. Spread the word and encourage your plant colleagues to submit an abstract! Plans are also in the works for a DOB field trip to the Desert Botanical Garden during the meeting. If you are thinking ahead, symposium proposals for the 2023 meeting are due in August. We encourage you to consider proposing a topic that addresses a question or phenomenon across taxa, and I can assist you in assembling the proposal and identifying speakers. I’m also planning to put together a workshop at the 2022 meetings that will foster connections between organismal plant biology and other divisions of SICB; let me know if you would like to facilitate a discussion on plant anatomy, plant behavior, plant signaling, or comparative plant morphology!

Thanks to everyone who has joined DOB (now over 100 strong), and we hope to see you in Arizona!

 

Message from the Secretary

Karolina Heyduk, secretary.dob@sicb.org

Karolina Heyduk

Hello! I’m taking over secretary duties from Chris Muir, and am happy to be aboard the Division of Botany at SICB! As Janet mentioned, we’re pleased to announce the winners of the best student poster and Rising Star in Organismal Botany winners from the 2021 conference:

Best Student Poster: Jenna Miladin, Undergraduate, John Carroll University. Title: Direct and indirect influences of climate on pollination and floral morphology.

Rising Star in Organismal Botany (Best Student Talk): Haley Branch, PhD Candidate, University of British Columbia. Title: Rapid evolution of leaf characteristics in response to drought stress in populations of scarlet monkeyflower.

 

Congrats to them and all the outstanding students who presented at this years’ SICB! #plantsarecooltoo

Finally, we have two elections this year – for Chair and Program Officer – so please be sure to check out candidate biographies below and vote!

 

Message from Student and Postdoctoral Affairs Committee Representative

Morgan Furze, morgan.furze@yale.edu 

Morgan Furze

Hi students and postdocs of the plant world! I hope you enjoyed connecting earlier this year and were able to take advantage of the many fantastic offerings at virtual SICB 2021. As the DOB representative on the Student/Postdoctoral Affairs Committee, I wanted to highlight one of our contributions to this year’s meeting. We held a virtual workshop on “Transferable Skills in Academia and Non-Academia” which featured a panel of non-academic professionals and had over 75 attendees who were eager to learn about transferrable skills for various careers! At SICB 2022, we are planning to host a workshop on science communication.

As always, please reach out to me at any point throughout the year if you have feedback, concerns, ideas, or questions!

 

Candidates for Chair

Ulrike Müller 

Ulrike Muller

Current Position: Professor, Department of Biology, California State University Fresno

Education: Ph.D. Marine Biology, University of Groningen, Netherlands (1997), M.Sc., Biology, Bielefeld University, Germany (1992)

Professional Experience: Post-docs at Cambridge University, UK; Wageningen University, Netherlands; Chiba University, Japan.

SICB Activities: Student Presentation Judge DCB (2010-2012), Student Support Committee (2010-2012); Co-Organizer of Data Management Workshop (2017), Member at Large (2018-2019), SICB symposium co-organizer (2019), Associate Editor IOB (2018-2019), Editor ICB (since 2019).

Other Memberships: Member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science AAAS; Member Ecological Society of America; Member of the Society for Experimental Biology; Member of the International Carnivorous Plant Society; Associate Editor Proceedings B of Royal Society, London.

Research Interests: My research area is bio fluid dynamics of small organisms. My favorite study organisms are in the carnivorous plant genus Utricularia (bladderworts).  I study how bladderwort traps catch their prey. I use engineering and mathematics approaches to better understand the fluid dynamics of these small suction feeding traps. I am also developing new approaches to study if and how bladderworts select their prey.

Goals Statement: DOB is the most recent of now 12 SICB divisions and one of only three divisions with an organismal focus. Plants are an important part of integrative and organismal biology, and DOB offers botanists with an organismal focus a home in a society that promotes integration across biological disciplines. My goal for DOB is to bring botanists to SICB and organismal biologists to plants as (one of) their study organisms. I would like to increase awareness of plants’ relevance within an integrative-and-comparative-biology agenda—plants make for great study organisms in research and in teaching.  An important practical goal for our division is to help promote botany-relevant presentations at our annual meetings, encourage symposia to feature botany-relevant talks, and help organize botany-relevant symposia and events. As a young division, DOB also has a young membership: three quarters of our division’s members are early-career scientists (students and post-docs).  So DOB is in an excellent position to role model how early-career scientists reshape science and engagement.

 

Michael R. McKain 

Michael McKain

Current Position:  Assistant Professor, Department of Biological Sciences, The University of Alabama; Curator of The University of Alabama Herbarium

Education: B.A., Biology, Wabash College (2007); Ph.D., University of Georgia (2012); Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Missouri-St. Louis (2013); Postdoctoral Researcher, Donald Danforth Plant Science Center (2014-2017)

Professional Experience: Associate Editor Frontiers in Plant Systematics and Evolution (2018-present); Associate Editor Applications in Plant Sciences (2020-Present); Special Issue Editor American Journal of Botany (2019-2021); Special Issue Editor Applications in Plant Sciences (2017); ad hoc reviewer for NSF DEB and PGRP; NSF reviewer DEB panel

SICB Activities: member Division of Botany (2021)

Other Memberships: Botanical Society of America; American Society of Plant Taxonomists

Research Interests: My research takes a holistic approach to understanding how plants diversify morphologically, physiologically, and taxonomically. Much of my work focuses on developing phylogenetic context to investigate how genomic changes, especially polyploidy, lead to evolutionary innovation in response to selective pressures. My work uses herbaria to gain insight into how changes over the last 200 years have impacted the diversity we see today, even in such a short time period.

Goals Statement: My identity as a researcher has always included a systematist at the core, a burgeoning genomicist in practice, and an evolutionary biologist at heart. As my lab has grown, I have begun to further integrate all of these ideas into a program that simply studies diversity. It was through my graduate student that I began to realize that SICB was a place where my collaborative and integrative approach to science would be met with like-minded colleagues. Serving as the Chair of the Division of Botany, I would make promotion of the interconnected nature of plant biology a priority by exploring ways in which researchers who might not see SICB as a place for them would be shown that they would prosper through the connections they can make with SICB. By furthering the integrative aspects of SICB from the genomic to the evolutionary scale and all those in between, we can push our understanding of how the great diversity of plant life came to be. I would be honored to work with an organization that values inclusivity and supporting a diverse research community. I would be excited to explore potential avenues to promote the inclusion of more undergraduate researchers from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds and give opportunities for returning, non-traditional, and working students to engage in research and the SICB experience.

 

Candidates for Program Officer

Morgan Furze 

Morgan Furze

Current Position: Donnelley Postdoctoral Fellow, Yale University

Education: B.A. Biology, Bucknell University (2012); Ph.D. Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University (2019)

Professional Experience: Assistant Editor, SICB’s Integrative and Comparative Biology journal (2019-present); Review Editor, Frontiers in Forests and Global Change (2019-present)

SICB Activities: Division of Botany member (2019-present); Division of Botany representative, Student/Postdoctoral Affairs Committee (2019-present); Assistant Editor, Integrative and Comparative Biology (2019-present); Recipient, Rising Star in Organismal Botany Award (2019)

Other Memberships: Botanical Society of America

Research Interests: My research integrates tools from plant physiology, forest ecology, and isotope biogeochemistry with microCT imaging to study plant carbon dynamics and the implications for plant and ecosystem function in a changing world.

Goals Statement: I was thrilled to attend SICB for the first time in 2019 when the Division of Botany made its debut and I have been committed to supporting its success since then. SICB offers a fantastic home base for integrative plant biologists and a unique opportunity for plant and animal biologists to learn from each other. I would be excited to serve as an officer and to help the Division of Botany continue to grow as a diverse and inclusive Community!

 

Lena Hileman 

Lena Hileman

Current Position:  Professor, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Kansas; Interim Director, Officer of Diversity in Science Training (ODST), University of Kansas.

Education: B.S., Biology, Concentration Cell & Molecular Biology, San Francisco State University (1994); M.S. Biology, Concentration Ecology and Systematic Biology, San Francisco State University (received 2000); Ph.D. Organsimic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University (2002); Postdoctoral researcher, Yale University (2002-2005).

Professional Experience: Editorial Board, New Phytologist (2013-present); Associate Editor, Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution (2009-2012); Botanical Society of America, Structure & Development Section Program Officer (2018-Present).

SICB Activities:  Member of Division of Botany (2020-present). One Ph.D. student from my group presented at SICB January 2020.

Other Memberships: Botanical Society of America

Research Interests: My research program is focused on discovering the patterns and processes of floral trait evolution. We address this overarching question using phylogenetic, quantitative genetic, developmental genetic and genomic tools. Current work is focused on understand the developmental genetics underlying shifts in flower symmetry, and on the evolutionary and developmental processes for parallel shifts from bee- to hummingbird-adapted flowers.

Statement of Goals: My goals for joining the SICB Division of Botany leadership team are 1) to bring my experience and close eye to detail as a program director of the Botany conference to SICB to ensure conference programming success, 2) to increase Division of Botany exposure within the Botany community, specifically encouraging participation of eco-evo-devo plant researchers at all career stages, and 3) to bring my experience as director of KU-ODST to SICB, working with leadership to ensure diversity and inclusion in the society and its hosted conferences.

Spring 2021: Division of Phylogenetics & Comparative Biology

Message from the Chair

David Blackburn, chair.dpcb@sicb.org

Thanks to all that participated in the virtual SICB 2021 meeting. We had an excellent competition for the David and Marvalee Wake Award competition for best student presentations. Please join me in congratulating our winners, Jack Boyette for best talk and Tony Lapsanksy for best poster! Thank you to all of the participants for their high-quality presentations.

This is my final year as SICB DPCB Chair, which followed a term as the DPCB Secretary. Thinking about the future of the division, I am pleased by the excellent group of scientists and students that have recently and continue to engage with DPCB. Over the past few years, DPCB began the Ask-an-Expert booth, which have been well received even while completely virtual in 2021! We have seen more and more involvement in the Wake Award competition with each year, culminating in 18 submissions for the 2021 best talk competition. DPCB added a new divisional editor for Integrative and Comparative Biology, Dr. Hannah Wood of the National Museum of Natural History. And we have seen a good number of papers from DPCB members in the new Integrative Organismal Biology.

With many changes in our divisional leadership happening over the coming year, we will have new challenges to tackle. We will continue to find ways to engage divisions across SICB as well as other societies focused on ecology and evolution. We also must further engage and support a broader community of scientists and students of many identities, especially Black, indigenous, and other people of color. A greater diversity of voices is critical not only to tackling the scientific questions that fascinate all of us, but also in growing the ranks of mentors that can support students and early career scientists of all identities.

I want to extend a special note of thanks to our division Secretary, Dr. Haley O’Brien. I have really appreciated her enthusiasm and dedication to the division, especially bringing the yearly Ask-an-Expert booth to fruition.

Welcome to Dr. Leigha Lynch who is now our new division Program Officer.

Next year will also bring both a new division Chair (Dr. Samantha Price) and new division Secretary (Dr. Ryan Felice). The future of the Division of Phylogenetic and Comparative Biology is bright.

 

Join Us in Welcoming Our New Officers!

From DPCB Chair-Elect, Samantha Price:

I am excited to be chair-elect for the Division of Phylogenetic and Comparative Biology. I will work to grow our small but mighty division by building upon the amazing efforts by Haley O’Brien and the “Ask an Expert Booth” that she pioneered, to make us indispensable to our members and the broader SICB community! My personal priorities are to lead efforts to support our Early Career Researchers, especially those marginalized by systemic biases inherent within our institutions, and to build strong connections with other SICB divisions, potentially through joint symposia and workshops. If you are a grad student or postdoc and have workshop/symposia ideas but would like some support developing a proposal I encourage you to reach out to me or any of our DPCB committee and we will glad to help and provide advice. I would also love to hear your priorities for DPCB; what can we be doing to better support you? If you have ideas and suggestions please share them with me.

From DPCB Program Officer, Leigha Lynch:

I am very excited to take on the role of Program Officer for DPCB this year and thank Todd Oakley for paving the way. I’m looking forward to seeing the many fascinating symposia proposals for SICB 2022 and aim to support those that focus on understanding the evolution of taxa and their associated traits. In particular, I aim to support those using phylogenetic and phylogenetic comparative methods and those that are promoting novel approaches within these fields.

From DPCB Secretary-Elect, Ryan Felice:

I am thrilled to be serving as the secretary-elect this year and learning the ropes from our current secretary Haley O’Brien. I have loved participating in the Ask-an-Expert Booth over the last few years and I’m excited to help keep the booth going strong. I can’t wait to bring you the latest and greatest DPCB events and announcements in our newsletter.

 

DPCB Student and Postdoctoral Updates & Opportunities

Emily Lessner, Divisional SPDAC Representative

This year, SPDAC adapted to the online format smoothly. In place of the first-timer orientation we had a first-timer video up on the welcome page that received nice feedback. Our annual workshop covered transferable skills in academia and non-academia. It featured short panel discussion followed by breakout rooms and was well attended. We had a booth in the exhibitor hall that had links to our brochures and posters covering a variety of topics. Along with the booth, each division representative held a virtual office hour, and though these were not attended, we feel being available was still important. There was also a well-attended SPDAC / Royal Society publishing workshop covering all aspects of publication.

Next year we are adding a brochure on mental health, online resources, and coping. We’d like to increase booth traffic, involvement, and knowledge of SPDAC’s role, so at the booth we plan to host SICB members of interest to facilitate discussions that junior SICB members might have trouble initiating alone. Also, we plan to have short skill demos on a variety of topics (editing 3D graphics, yoga, science communication, interview strategies, figure making, etc.). Our workshop plans for next year will center around science communication with subtopics including storytelling, art, accessibility, open software, and more.

 

David and Marvalee Wake Awards for Best Student Presentations

Haley O’Brien, secretary.dpcb@sicb.org 

Each year that I have been an officer for this division, the Wake Awards have become increasingly competitive and continue to showcase some of the best of early career systematics, genomics, and phylogenetic comparative methods. My sincere thanks to the judges who generously volunteer their time to evaluate talks and posters – the student competitors are making the job difficult!

Congratulations to this year’s presenters for making it through a competitive selection process, and to our winners for their outstanding research and presentation skills!

Winner of the Wake Award for Best Student Oral Presentation, Jack Boyette

Jack Boyette

My frog non-visual opsin research began in the summer of 2019 as part of an REU at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History under the mentorship of Dr. Rayna Bell and Dr. Ryan Schott. I continued to work on the project remotely while finishing my undergraduate degree at Berry College, which I completed in May 2020. My most immediate goals are admission into a PhD program (still waiting to hear back from programs – so fingers crossed!) and completing a northbound thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail, which I will begin in March 2021. As a prospective PhD student, I am broadly interested in investigating genetic and ecological underpinnings of differential disease outcomes in frogs; and as a prospective thru-hiker, I aim to hike from Georgia to Maine in five months.

Erik Iverson

Honorable Mention: Erik Iverson, Ph.D. Student at U.T. Austin, for his work on positive selection on mitochondrial genes in high-elevation species

Winner of the Wake Award for Best Student Poster Presentation, Tony Lapsansky

Tony Lapsansky

I am a 5th year graduate student in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Montana. My doctoral research focuses on how birds evolved to accomplish locomotion in both air and water, from the perspective of muscle contractile dynamics, kinematics, fluid dynamics, and morphometrics. My goal for the future is to become a professor of biology at an R1 university. I hope to combine techniques from biomechanics, evolutionary biology, and sensory neuroscience to understand how animals move through the world in a comparative context.

 

 

 

Many thanks our student presenters! If you are a student researching systematic and phylogenetic comparative biology, submit your abstract to be considered for next year’s Wake Award session in 2022! We welcome all research focusing on trees – how to make them and how to use them for comparative analysis!

 

Workshop Opportunity

The Evolutionary Quantitative Genetics Workshop for 2021, sponsored by Friday Harbor Laboratories of the University of Washington, will occur online this year, from July 12-16. The Workshop is led by Stevan Arnold and Joe Felsenstein, with 6 other lecturers. It will involve lectures, discussion, and computer lab exercises.

A link to the application form can be found here. The workshop will review the basics of evolutionary genetics of quantitative characters and its connection to evolution observed at various time scales. An aim of the workshop is to build a bridge between the traditionally separate disciplines of quantitative genetics and comparative methods. It is intended for graduate students, postdocs, and junior faculty. There is a cost of $105, payable by those who are accepted.

 

Diversity and Inclusion

As the DPCB Executive Committee reflects on recent years and the turbulent events that marked the beginning of 2021 in the United States, we recognize that equity, equality, and bias must be thoughtfully examined in our personal, political, community, and professional lives. As a division in an international scientific society, we have a duty to do better for all of our members. Our role is to provide a safe, productive venue for sharing new ideas, building collaborations, and celebrating the accomplishments of students and early career members. Scientific societies are crucial to career-building and job security; therefore, bias in our personal viewpoints and the structure of our activities is harmful. We fail to achieve our mission if we do not work to ensure that these benefits extend to all of our members; if we do not identify concrete steps to foster inclusivity in our division or amplify the voices and talents of members from underrepresented groups.

Three years ago, we started the Ask-An-Expert Booth––currently our most visible SICB event––with a goal of providing supportive, one-on-one assistance beyond fast-paced workshops. Behind the scenes, a primary goal has been highlighting the stellar work being done in phylogenetics, comparative methods, and data analysis by women and minorities. SICB members, especially those just beginning their research careers, should be able to see someone they can relate to under a banner that says “Expert.” We have succeeded in promoting early career women, but we need to improve recruitment of Experts with respect to race, sexual orientation, and disability status.

As the Executive Committee for DPCB, we acknowledge that we can and must do better. We will begin by working with SICB leadership and the Broadening Participation Committee to survey demographic data of our members and to better recruit Experts. We pledge to take concrete steps to build a more diverse division, and welcome any ideas and feedback our members may have.

Spring 2021: Division of Vertebrate Morphology

Message from the Chair

Rick Blob, chair.dvm@sicb.org

I look forward to SICB every year. It means seeing friends and science I care about, renewing connections and building foundations for future discoveries. During a normal year, putting the annual meeting together is a huge undertaking, and everyone who is part of the effort deserves thanks. But so much of 2020 was frightening, chaotic and sad. The work to put our meeting together under these circumstances was really extraordinary. Thoughtful, creative efforts from the Society and Division officers made inclusion and accessibility priorities, helping all of us to be part of the meeting as best as we could. As I move into the role of DVM Chair, I want to first give sincere thanks to the people whose hard work made Virtual SICB 2021 possible, especially our Division officers who just finished their terms: Chair Patricia Hernandez, Program Officer Mason Dean, and Past Chair John Hutchinson. Thanks for your leadership and work for DVM in such a challenging time. And, further thanks to Patricia for continuing to serve as SICB President-Elect.

Eva Herbst

With the virtual meeting, we were able to continue the tradition of a dedicated session for the D. Dwight Davis Best Student Paper presentations. From an excellent group of talks, the winner was Eva Herbst from the University of Zürich, Switzerland, for her presentation “New methods support the possibility of a salamander-like walk in the Permian tetrapod Eryops.” From another excellent group of presentations, the Karel Liem poster award went to Amanda Palecek-McClung from Clemson University, for her presentation “Stuck on you: how pelvic girdle morphology influences adhesion.” Congratulations to the winners, and thank you to all the participants for sharing your research. Thanks also to the intercontinental group of DVM members who helped to judge.

Spring is election season for SICB, and DVM will be voting for a new Chair-Elect and Program Officer-Elect. We have outstanding candidates for both offices: Lara Ferry and Casey Holliday for Chair-Elect, and Shannon Gerry and Alice Gibb for Program Officer-Elect. Please see the profiles for these candidates later in this newsletter, and thank you to all the candidates for your willingness to serve DVM. Thanks also to Katie Staab, David Coughlin, and Andrea Ward for serving as our nominating committee.

Amanda Palecek-McClung

Looking toward SICB 2022 is an exciting prospect. As you’ll see in Nicole Danos’s Program Officer message below, DVM will be supporting several interesting symposia. Proposals are usually due in August, so spring and summer are a great time to be thinking about symposia for the 2023 meeting, scheduled for Austin, Texas. If you have ideas for potential topics, an interest in organizing a symposium, or questions about the process, please reach out to Program Officer Nicole Danos for help with the steps involved.

Even though SICB wasn’t in person this year, the virtual socials were a great way to connect, with a special thanks to Armita Manafzadeh for leading the way with the Wonder platform. Special thanks also to Ty Hedrick, for sustaining the tradition of regional SICB meetings and organizing a Virtual Southeast Regional DVM-DCB meeting “at” UNC this past fall, which was a big success. Regional meetings are a wonderful way to build nearby connections and get feedback on ideas ahead of the national meeting, especially for students. DVM has some divisional funds that can help support regional meetings – consider hosting one in your area!

It’s hard to forecast how a lot of things will work this upcoming year, but we’re always happy to hear your ideas about symposia, socials, regional meetings, or any other SICB or DVM topic. Please contact me at rblob@clemson.edu, or any of the DVM officers with thoughts and suggestions. We’re here to help.

Before closing this message, I’d like to refer DVM members to the heartfelt tribute to Steve Wainwright, compiled by Mark Westneat and John Long and posted here. Steve’s research, creativity, and generosity touched many of us, and continue to be an inspiration.

Stay safe, and thanks for being part of the DVM community!

 

Message from the Program Officer

Nicole Danos, dpo.dvm@sicb.org

Congratulations to DVM for not only surviving but shining at our first ever virtual SICB meeting! Although the overall number of posters and oral presentations was slightly lower than SICB 2020, DVM and DCB together again represented about 20% of all presentations at SICB 2021. Our Division supported 8 symposia with diverse topics- a big thank you to all organizers and participants! We are especially grateful that the virtual format of SICB 2021 enabled our Division to reach over 120 high school students and their teachers- special thanks to the organizers of the symposium “An evolutionary tail: evodevo, structure and function of post-anal appendages” Janeke Schwaner, Tonia Hsieh and Craig McGowan  for making the most of a difficult year and sharing the wonders of Vertebrate Morphology! If you have a story of how the virtual format enabled you to do something different but exciting during SICB 2021, we’d love to hear it!

For SICB 2022, DVM is sponsoring 7 out of 11 symposia. Here is the list of topics and organizers:

  1. Lesser known transitions: organismal form and function across abiotic gradients (Charlotte Easterling, Mary Kate O’Donnell, Matthew Kolmann)
  2. Open source solutions in experimental design (Kirk Onthank, Richelle Tanner)
  3. Causal mechanisms of interspecific metabolic scaling patterns (Jon Harrison, Meghan Duell)
  4. Morphology and evolution of female copulatory morphology in Amniotes (Patty Brennan, Günther Wagner)
  5. Evolutionary conservation and diversity in a key vertebrate behavior: “walking” as a model system (Haley Amplo, Alice Gibb, Sandy Kawano)
  6. Best practices for bioinspired design education, research and product development (Marianne Alleyne, Aimy Wissa, Andrew Suarez, William Barley)
  7. Reciprocal illumination between ecology and biomechanics: evolution, integration, and constraint (Lara Ferry, Tim Higham)

Applications for SICB 2023 (Austin) symposia will be due at the end of August. Please email me (PO email?) if you have any ideas. Here is a list of past symposia; notice how successful symposium proposals often are integrative in their topics.

Lastly, an update on the Core Concepts of Vertebrate Morphology. As the global pandemic required instructors of Vertebrate Morphology to rethink how to effectively teach their classes online, Lisa Whitenack, Katie Staab and I informally shared a draft of the concepts in August 2020. These concepts were the result of an iterative process soliciting input from the DVM membership. A request for one last round of comments will be coming soon, so please keep a lookout in your inbox and share with us your thoughts.

And a second last thing: DVM is on Facebook and Twitter (#SICB_DCB_DVM). Please post to share your queries and successes!

 

Message from the Secretary

Angela Horner, Secretary.DVM@sicb.org

Happy 2021 to all. Despite the circumstances, this year’s SICB was quite a success!

As a reminder for elections, you can vote even if you are not currently up-to-date with dues, so please take the time to review the candidate bios below and watch for announcements from SICB regarding elections.

Candidates for Chair-Elect

 Lara Ferry 

Lara Ferry

Current Position: President’s Professor and Associate Dean of Research and Strategic Initiatives, Arizona State University

Education: PhD UC Irvine

Professional Experience: Highlights of some related professional experiences outside of SICB activities include current service as executive editor of the journal Functional Ecology, and on the governing boards of ASU’s Faculty Women’s Association and the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists (local meeting host for 2021 Joint Meetings), past President of the American Elasmobranch Society, past service on equity and inclusion committees for ASIH and AES, BSP judge (many times), current and past service on several awards committees.

SICB Activities: SICB Activities include current membership on the SICB Development Committee (assuming role of Chair this coming year), and past service as ICB Editorial Board member, DVM Secretary, current and past BSP judge (many times), current and Symposium Organizer (2022, and several times in the past)

Other Memberships: British Ecological Society, American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, American Elasmobranch Society

Research Interests: can be summed up as the study of functional traits associated with the evolution of jaws and aquatic prey acquisition in fishes; details ad nauseum can be found at my website:  morphology.asu.edu

Statement of Goals: My primary goals in serving as DVM Chair are two-fold:  1) I want to encourage and support through allyship a diverse membership in our division and in our society, and ensure equity and inclusion are the highest priority in all that we do.  While SICB is already doing well in some areas of DEI compared with other societies, there are still hidden barriers that need to be eliminated, particularly with regard to access; 2) I hope to foster a stronger sense of inclusion and ways to engage with our membership more fully in these challenging times.  DVM has always created a sense of welcome that I have enjoyed since being a student member (so many years ago I don’t want to put the number here). COVID has made the world a different place, providing good outcomes as well as bad, and both of which we need to learn from.  There will be no going back to a pre-COVID world.  We can move forward, however, combining the best of the past with the new, and important, lessons/skills/positive values we have learned.  DVM can be a source of comfort and camaraderie for those feeling isolated by the pandemic, providing emotional support, connectivity, and hope in a challenging world.  Many ask, “what is the real advantage of joining a professional society and paying dues each year?”  The exchange of scientific information is only the very beginning.  This, I answer, is the real purpose: Having a group of people who understand what you do, and why you do it, for its inherent and intrinsic value, provides you with the affirmation that you need to keep going on this path, even when day-to-day life seems to place insurmountable challenges in that path.

 

Casey Holliday 

Casey Holliday

Current Position: Associate Professor of Anatomy, Integrative Anatomy Program, Department of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences, University of Missouri

Education: BS, 2007, Zoology, University of Florida; PhD, 2006, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Ohio University

Professional Experience: 2015-present: Associate Professor with Tenure, Department of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences, University of Missouri School of Medicine; 2009-2015: Assistant Professor, Department of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences, University of Missouri School of Medicine; 2007-2009: Assistant Professor, Department of Anatomy and Pathology, JCESOM, Marshall University; 2005-2007: Postdoctoral Researcher/Instructor of Anatomical Sciences, College of Osteopathic Medicine, Dept. of Biomedical Sciences, Ohio University.

SICB Activities: 2017-present: SICB Meetings buddy program mentor; 2013-2016 Secretary: Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB): Division of Vertebrate Morphology (DVM); 2000-present: Member.

Other Memberships: Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, American Association for Anatomists, AAAS, ISVM

Research Interests: Cranial biomechanics, paleobiology, reptiles and other vertebrates, skeletal tissue biology, feeding, joints

Statement of Goals: You all in DVM should be commended for the way you pulled together to tackle the pandemic so far. Shared course content, guest lectures, rote enthusiasm, and as I write this, a still ongoing virtual conference… These are all the result of a strong, generous, dependable and boisterous community. As DVM Chair I would be proud to work with you to maintain this inertia you’ve generated doing excellent research, increasing exposure, broadening participation and sharing our science.  I look forward to continuing to develop successful and inclusive programming throughout the year such as small, topical meetings, online presentations, workshops and even casual activities. As educators and colleagues, you’ve proven we can consolidate and share materials regardless of time and space and I hope to help promote and organize this evolving project. In the meantime, I look forward to seeing you all in person again immensely.

Candidates for Program Officer-Elect

Shannon Gerry 

Shannon Gerry

Current Position: Associate Professor of Biology, Fairfield University, Fairfield, CT

Education: Ph.D., 2008 Biological Sciences, University of Rhode Island; B.S., 2001 Biology, Bucknell University

Professional Experience: 2016- present, Associate Professor, Fairfield University; 2011-2016, Assistant Professor, Fairfield University; 2009-2011, NSF Postdoctoral Researcher, Wellesley College; 2008-2009, Visiting Assistant Professor, Arcadia University

SICB Activities: Active member since 2005, including DVM and DCB. DVM Best Student Paper Judge 2019; DCB Best Student Paper Judge 2011, 2012; Co-organized “Electromyography: Interpretation and Limitations in Functional Analyses of Musculoskeletal Systems” in 2008; Northeast regional DVM meetings including co-organizer at URI in 2007.

Other Memberships: International Society of Vertebrate Morphologists, co-organized “Interdisciplinary and Novel Approaches to Vertebrate Locomotion” for ICVM in 2013; Society for Experimental Biology.

Research interests: Functional morphology, muscle performance and ecology of feeding and locomotion in vertebrates, particularly fishes.

Goals Statement: I am honored to be nominated for the position of DVM Program Officer. My goals include continuing the successful work of recent Program Officers by organizing both classic and innovative sessions. I will promote the research of all of our student members, especially those who are competing for the Best Student Presentation and Poster Awards. I will encourage members of DVM to develop symposia with members from other divisions that highlight the integrative, diverse and cutting-edge nature of our Division and our Society.

 

Alice C. Gibb 

Alice Gibb

Current Position: Professor and Chair of Biology, Northern Arizona University

Education: B.A. Biology, Mount Holyoke College; Ph.D. Biology, University of California, Irvine

Professional Experience: Post-doctoral Researcher, California State University, Fullerton, 1997-1999; Assistant/Associate/Full Professor at Northern Arizona University, 1999-present; Chair of Biology at Northern Arizona University, 2019-present

SICB Activities: Member since 1990; Chair of Division of Vertebrate Morphology, 2014-2016; Society-Wide Secretary, 2018-2021

Other Memberships: Sigma Xi

Research Interests: Functional Morphology, Organism Environment Interactions, Comparative Physiology, Science Education

Statement of Goals: SICB is a large and vibrant society, but we face ongoing questions related to our annual meeting program. How do we integrate virtual and face-to-face activities in the post COVID-19 pandemic world? What is the role of non-academic research in our annual meeting? What resources should we allocate to science education during the meeting? How can we continue to promote visibility and success in early career SICB members, particularly SICB members from minoritized and under-represented populations? Although there are no easy answers to these questions, I aim to help SICB adopt positions and policies that maximize access to, and participation in, professional activities for early career scientists from diverse backgrounds. As Secretary, I was pleased to be able to move our newsletters away from static PDF files to the more dynamic and accessible HTML format. As DVM program officer, I would seek to help SICB leadership cultivate and develop new online venues for sharing scientific presentations and other professional materials. Increased online activities will promote scientific outreach and access to SICB’s activities by people across the globe. I also support SICB’s ongoing efforts to improve institutional transparency, develop formal practices that promote equity, and new efforts to remove systemic barriers to success in science. SICB has been my main society and DVM my home division since 1990; although I have served in a variety of roles, I think my skillset is particularly well matched to meet the demands of Divisional Program Officer. If elected, I would look forward to serving you to the best of my ability during the (undoubtedly) challenging times still ahead of us.

SICB Donors, 2020

Alexander Hall
Alice Gibb
Barbara Joos
Ben Dantzer
Bernard Rees
Billie Swalla
Brett Aiello
Brian Ramos-Guivas
Brian Tsukimura
Brian Walker
Cheryl Wilga
Christopher Richardson
Daniel Speiser
Darwin Jorgensen
David Collar
David Wake
Diana Hews
Dimitri Smirnoff
Donald Miles
Donald Mykles
Dorothy Zahor
Duncan MacKenzie
Dylan Wainwright
Elizabeth Adkins-Regan
Elizabeth Brainerd
Erica Westerman
Frances Bonier
Gregory Davis
Gregory Mutumi
Guy Charmantier
Haley Amplo
Hugh Ellis
Ignacio Moore
James Archie
Jamie Cornelius
Jenna Monroy
Jennifer Olori
John Wingfield
Joseph Thompson
Julia Notar
Kenneth Dial
Kenneth Sebens
Kristi Montooth
L. Michael Romero
Lara Ferry
Lars Schmitz
Lou and Karen Burnett
Maren Vitousek
Marvalee Wake
Mason Dean
Michael Baltzley
Michael Romero
Miriam Ashley-Ross
Ned Place
Patricia Morse
Philip Bergmann
Richard Blob
Robert Cox
Robert Podolsky and Allison Welch
Sandra Gaunt
Sandy Kawano
Sara O’Brien
Sarah Woodin
Spencer Mass
Susan Herring
Susan Williams
Terry West
Thomas Daniel
Tyson Hedrick
Vikram Iyengar
Wendy Hood

Remembering William Dawson

Bill Dawson. Photo: http://faculty-history.dc.umich.edu/faculty/william-r-dawson-0

William Ryan Dawson (1927-2020) was a well-known ornithologist and ecophysiologist whose career at the University of Michigan spanned more than 50 years. He served on the faculty of the Department of Biology, including a term as Department Chair (1974-1982), and as the Director of the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology (1982-1993).

Bill was President of the American Society of Zoologists (the precursor to SICB) in 1986. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1962), was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1965), and he was awarded the Loye and Alden Miller Research Award from the Cooper Ornithological Society (1996) for his lifetime of work in ornithological research. He supervised 19 doctoral students, one of whom (Richard Marsh) writes of Bill fondly below.

Robert Payne wrote an In Memoriam for Bill for The Auk, which is excerpted here.

Recollections from Richard Marsh

First, some serious reflections on Bill’s influence on my time at the Michigan Biological Station.  I was teaching high school at the time in between my undergraduate degree and going to graduate school. Ironically, I ended up in his course because the terrestrial ecology class I tried to enroll in was full. His approach to biology changed my interests from straight ecology to a physiological approach to animal adaptation, and led me to apply to work with him at the University of Michigan.  Bill was a demanding advisor.  His dedication to quality science could be intimidating to some, but definitely kept you trying your best. When I ventured into speculation during one seminar, he reminded me that I was, “skating on the thin ice of my knowledge,” and he was correct to do so.  His dedication to producing quality data was impressive. He advised his students that “instruments will lie to you every chance they get,” and “an instrument that cannot be calibrated is worthless.” He pushed all of his students, including me, to be independent scientists, and never took credit for the work we pursued on our own.

One aspect of Bill’s personality that you may hear from others is that he was famed for his sense of humor, which could be acerbic at times. Perhaps, one example will suffice. I attended a symposium on environmental physiology at the Michigan Biological Station during my graduate school days.  In attendance were a number of scientists whose work was mostly lab based. However, because the theme of the conference related to organisms coping with the environment, the first speaker went out of their way to try to illustrate how they had done some field work. This led the following speakers to bend over backwards to do the same. When it was Bill’s turn to talk, he started out by saying that he was equally dedicated to field biology. So much so, that he always tried to keep the windows open in his laboratory when he was collecting metabolic data.

Bill Dawson receiving an award

Stephen A. Wainwright: Scientist, Artist, Teacher and Mentor

Mark Westneat (University of Chicago) and John Long (Vassar College)

Steve Wainwright, at sea in Hawaii, 1989. Courtesy of John Long.

Stephen A. Wainwright (1931- 2019) was a leader in Biomechanics who combined his passion for breaking down disciplinary boundaries with his deep and creative insights into form and function in nature and design. Steve’s infectious enthusiasm for cross-disciplinary, open-ended inquiry, and his delight in people and their creativity, influenced generations of SICB members and the trajectory of SICB itself.

Well before the origin of the Division of Comparative Biomechanics at SICB, Steve was one of this discipline’s global founders, integrating approaches in morphology, physiology, and engineering in the ground-breaking collaborative book, Mechanical Design in Organisms (1976). He also helped develop the field through his faculty position at Duke University (1964-2019), and his leadership of the American Society of Biomechanics (President 1981), and of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology, then the American Society of Zoologists (President 1988). The details of Steve’s life, career, and influence were described by Robin Smith in her Duke Today obituary.

Speakers from the first Biomechanics sessions at SICB (then ASZ) in 1984. Courtesy of Mimi Koehl.

This tribute highlights the extraordinary impact Steve had on his students and colleagues. Many of the people influenced by Steve contributed their thoughts for this essay (see here for their full remarks). Steve was a creative and ground-breaking scientist who saw new ways to make connections between disciplines and ideas. As Tom Daniel stated, “He was, in a sense, a Leonardo da Vinci of our generation.”  From his early work on corals, sea fans, and anemones to later research on fishes and dolphins, Steve’s insight into the mechanical design of organisms was profound. Kate Loudon reflected, “It is hard to describe in words how extraordinary it was to be in the biomechanics group at Duke as a graduate student. Steve’s generosity, creativity, and joyfulness was a catalyst for amazing interactions and scientific advances.” Steve taught us the beauty of blending art and science and the amazing scientific benefits of conceiving wild and crazy ideas in biology. Barb Block put it poetically: “He fed us his enthusiasm and inspiration, and we interwove our various budding expertises into a more complex canvas because he helped each one of us paint our unique science in a variety of interdisciplinary colors.”

Steve’s signature approach of interdisciplinary integration came to the fore with the blending of art, biology, and engineering for diverse audiences. Steve helped to found the Center for Inquiry-Based Learning with Norm Budnitz, who wrote, “Steve worked to bring the art of questioning to elementary and middle school science teaching, with all his usual joy in experiencing the natural world.” Steve’s own artistic focus was as a sculptor, and he encouraged those around him to consider building a model of their organism to test their understanding and deepen their insight. Ann Pabst recalls a key lesson she learned with Steve: “Build it!  If you think you know how a structure works, try to build it – this endeavor will illuminate what you do not know quickly and emphatically! Then try again!” This approach was fundamental to many of us who worked with Steve, and the power of it culminated in Steve’s creation of the BioDesign Studio, an independent place for art and science to flourish. Co-founder Chuck Pell explained, “Steve thought up the idea of The BioDesign Studio as an institute for living structures, a place where anyone could come to build tangible models of their system. Those models inevitably surprised even the most learned of us by exposing unexpected properties.” Building models, whether physical, sculptural, mathematical, or computational, as a way of sparking insight into organismal function, is a key part of Steve’s intellectual legacy.

Steve speaking in costume, circa 1980. Courtesy of Bill Kier.

Steve’s students recall that his impact on our science and our careers was felt powerfully through his mentorship, supportive personality, and his intuitive understanding of what we, as aspiring young people in science, required to be successful. He encouraged us to seek, discover, and investigate the important, difficult topics in our fields. As Mimi Koehl writes, Steve helped us focus on the basic principles of our work, “subjecting us to the dreaded crystal ball question when we came to him with a research idea: If I had a crystal ball (Steve would say), and told you the answer to that question, so what? Why is it worth knowing that?” Yet his challenges were leavened with his continuous support. Sue and Clay Cook remember, “Steve’s genius was to use his critical eye to guide and focus our work while connecting us to the expertise of friends and colleagues.”  Lisa Orton notes, “Steve was always about giving permission, his approach was to find out what we might be interested in doing or learning, and then giving permission to explore the thing we most dreamed of exploring.” Gail Grabowsky recalls Steve saying “I am just here to help you give yourself permission to become all you can be!”

Steve was personally, emotionally, and financially generous. His kindness and laughter helped to reduce the stress of academia, of making it through graduate school, or getting to the next level. His joy for art and science was profound, inspiring students and colleagues to open their minds and consider new ways of thinking. Melina Hale recalls, “Steve brought wonderful richness to science and life, drawing connections between art and biology through exploration and wonder. He mentored kindly and with a creative joy that was infectious.” Katie Muzik remembers a special moment with Steve: “How gleeful and ecstatic was our SAW, expressing his delight when introducing me 5 decades ago to the springtime redbuds and dogwoods blooming alongside Duke Forest! I was astounded and enchanted then, and remain quite amazed now, just remembering his unbridled and emphatic joy.” Janice Voltzow explained, “Steve nurtured us with creativity, generosity, and fine wines.”  Bill Kier recalls, “he inspired by his boldness in reaching beyond normal disciplinary boundaries, and he had an infectious enthusiasm for form, function and beauty in nature that altered my view of the world.”

Steve filming blue marlins off Hawaii in 1990. Courtesy of Mark Westneat.

Steve’s blend of scientific rigor, generosity, and support created a wonderful environment where ideas flourished and important research happened. We are all honored to have worked with Steve, to have had a chance to reflect on how profoundly he changed us, and to appreciate his sculptor’s marks on the field of Comparative Biomechanics that he helped build. Steve Wainwright’s scientific legacy is destined to live on through the many ideas he developed and the people he inspired to continue exploring organismal design in creative ways.

Honoring Stephen Wainwright: a Compendium

Barbara Block

Steve Wainwright for me was inspirational; he lifted me throughout my career from intern with Dr. Frank Carey at WHOI to professor at Stanford. He was more than a committee member,  he was truly a guiding mentor in my Duke graduate school experience and my entire career!  His enthusiasm for my efforts on big fish from when I first met Steve – when I was dissecting a porbeagle shark at WHOI in the summer of 1979, to his ongoing support of our Tag A Giant Campaign to put new technology on giant fish in the sea – kept me always motivated to do more to uncover the mysteries of the ocean biodiversity, especially biomechanically. I was thrilled to show him our first video looking at the biomechanics of a the tail beat in a live giant bluefin in the sea complete with high resolution accelerometry and video-of course he said “Whoa”!  He was a true advisor in the 1980s to all of us in biomechanics and physiology at Duke, caring, guiding, enthusiastic and nurturing. His mentoring contribution was to nurture all of us as students with a mind, spirit and whole body experience- that touched our own source of inner creativity, enabling many of us to blossom as scientists. He fed us his enthusiasm and inspiration, and we interwove our various budding expertises into a more complex canvas because he helped each one of us- paint our unique science in a variety of interdisciplinary colors. I miss him greatly but know when I dissect a bluefin or a lamnid shark with my students, we all know so much more of what to look for because of his creative thinking. He will always remain one of a kind — and the engine that sparked so many of us into the large animal biomechanics-of-movement path.

Norm Budnitz

As a founder of the Center for Inquiry-Based Learning, Steve worked to bring the art of questioning to elementary and middle school science teaching. And of course, he did so with all his usual joy in experiencing the natural world.

Sue and Clay Cook 

In the late 1960s, we (Clay and Sue Cook) were part of a diverse group of Steve’s graduate students with interests ranging from sea cucumber physiology to symbiosis and homing behavior in limpets. Steve’s genius was to use his critical eye to guide and focus our work while connecting us to the expertise of friends and colleagues (Martin Wells for Sue and Len Muscatine for Clay).  His remarkable intellect (not to mention his generous hospitality and amazing wine cellar) made our graduate years very special!

Hugh Crenshaw

I never managed to visit Steve’s wine “cellar,” but that doesn’t mean I didn’t benefit from it.  Donna and I were throwing a big party at my house to celebrate my 30th.  Steve arrived hours before the scheduled time, apologizing that he had a conflict and could not attend.  In a classic example of Steve’s incredible generosity, he also apologized that he didn’t have a wine from the year of my birth, but he did have one from the year of my conception.  What a great bottle!  Donna and I will always miss Steve’s smile and spirit.

Tom Daniel

Many of us owe our careers to Steve and, in small ways, have attempted to replicate his support of students.  He promoted excellence and generously supported  graduate student research and scholarship, he encouraged originality, and his selfless support of early career scientists was a role model to all of us.  In many ways,  Steve ushered in a sort of golden age of Comparative Biomechanics — bringing together science, technology and observations of nature to reveal the principles of function and form in living systems. His keen observations informed both his art and his science and led to discoveries of principles of structures and movement in biology. He was, in a sense, a Leonardo (da Vinci, not Dicaprio!)  of our generation, ushering in the renaissance of comparative biomechanics.  You would be hard pressed to find an equivalent.

It was Steve who got me working on a crazy project of swimming in skates.  He took a small crew of us to Beaufort to film them.  We did a fluid dynamics analysis of their swimming which, I think, Steve called “a bunch of doodly math.” But he really got the last word in helping title the paper, “Fast forward flapping flight from flexing fins.”  He declined authorship since he didn’t do any of the doodly math.

Mark Denny

It would be very difficult to sum up SAW’s influence in biomechanics and on the students he fostered: a passion for the science, flamboyant shirts, and bawdy songs. But a large part of his influence was his generosity. After I graduated from Duke, he hired me for a year on his own nickel to do whatever research I wanted. I ended up working on spider silk, and that started me off on all that has followed. Similar generosity – both monetary and intellectual – jump-started the whole field, with effects that have cascaded down through the years. We owe him a lot.

Olaf Ellers

Steve was indeed a special, inspiring person with an extraordinary capability to support the creative work of others. When I started graduate school at Duke in 1983, Steve was chair of the department and he gave a wonderful welcoming speech to the 10 new graduate students that year. He said that the department had chosen us and had great confidence in us and that we had 5 fully funded years to do whatever creative thing we wanted to do. To me this was a surprising and very inspiring view of graduate school and I have carried that sense of permission to be creative with me for the rest of my life. During my graduate career Steve continued to support me with encouragement and funding.

He had a joyous, accessible grasp of animal form and function introducing new broad brush understandings of biomechanics and inspiring a generation of scientific work.

Gail Grabowsky

My favorite Wainwright paraphrased quote is: “I am just here to help you give yourself permission to become all you can be!“ So very Buddhist of him to help us get out of our own way!

Melina Hale

I was so fortunate to have Steve as an undergraduate mentor. He introduced me to biomechanics of musculoskeletal systems and movement, powerfully shaping my research career. He also brought wonderful richness to science and life, drawing connections between art and biology through exploration and wonder. He mentored kindly and with a creative joy that was infectious. Even for a young student with little experience, he treated you like a colleague whose ideas deserved careful thought, nurturing self esteem as well as scientific minds.

Matt Healy

When I die, I hope I end up in a place that resembles Steve Wainwright’s office or living room, only with even more cool objects and infinite time to explore it. He was curious about everything. His collection of biological specimens, art works, puzzles, toys, games, gadgets, and indescribable whatever was truly amazing. His wide-ranging curiosity was an inspiration for us all.

My own career has gone off into totally unexpected directions, mostly in the Biotech space, but one thing has remained constant: whenever I need to make a decision about what to do next, I choose whichever available option looks to me the most interesting.

Harry Itagaki

I do remember something that SAW said that has always stuck with me.  We were leaving the BoZo [Botany/Zoology at Duke] Auditorium after a not-so-great seminar by some eminent English biologist; as we walked out, he observed to me that “BS always sounds better with an English accent.”  That’s as true as things get.

Sonke Johnsen

The first time I saw Steve, he was 55, and I was a dancer thinking of becoming a biologist. We stood outside his office, and he told me about Tai Chi, which he called the oldest dance. I liked his smile.

I spent the next six years trying hard, and failing, to please him – not even being able to tell a parrot beak from a squid beak as they were both pulled from his exam bag. Four years after that, I came back to North Carolina, and over the next couple decades we talked about dance, art, children, and grandchildren – sometimes even science.

The last time I saw Steve, he didn’t talk, but he still had that smile I’d known for over thirty years. A kind smile, but also mischievous, like he could see something you couldn’t. As a student in his office, I always imagined that there was a secret garden behind my head that he was enjoying, that would vanish the moment I turned my head. Now, at 55 myself, I think I get it. Good-bye, Steve.

Amy Johnson

Steve Wainwright is a keystone scientist – he has shaped the careers and science of scholars of biomechanics, such as myself, in deep, fundamental and lasting ways. And this was achieved with a joyful graciousness, colorful artistry and abiding generosity that is woven into the field he inspired. He was an inspiration on so many levels. I will always remember a SICB banquet when I was an unknown graduate student in Mimi Koehl’s lab, when he caught my eye from across the room and, in a gesture of inclusiveness, raised his glass to me and so I to him.

Bill Kier

I benefited tremendously from Steve’s mentoring, support and generosity.  Steve was passionate about the importance of good writing, he insisted that we always consider the broader implications of our work, he was unfailingly generous and supportive, he was a steadfast and enthusiastic advocate, he inspired by his boldness in reaching beyond normal disciplinary boundaries, and he had an infectious enthusiasm for form, function and beauty in nature that altered my view of the world.  I miss him.

Mimi Koehl

Steve taught us students to think broadly about the basic principles our studies could reveal by subjecting us to the dreaded crystal ball question when we came to him with a research idea: “If I had a crystal ball and told you the answer to that question, so what? Why is it worth knowing that?”  We would slink away and think about why that issue was worth pursuing, but when we went back to Steve to tell him, he would crystal-ball us again, over and over until we could say to him, “This IS of basic importance, and here’s why…”

Mike LaBarbera

Steve Wainwright taught me how to write, how to use chopsticks, how to teach and to honor the craft of teaching, and to celebrate one’s aesthetic sensibility. And he loaned me his beach house for my honeymoon. He was a full-service mentor.

John Long

Steve taught me to be wary of the curse of the academic: you can criticize anything.  But we aren’t trained, expected, or encouraged to do the opposite: find the pearl in the oyster.  While ready and willing to critique, Steve showed us how to find the gems hidden in every idea and every human doing this courageous creative work of scientific investigation.  Wah!

Kate Loudon

I have totally struggled how to capture the extraordinary, creative, constructive, challenging, and fun environment that SAW generated (and my gratitude) in mere words. So I thought I would just say that:

It is hard to describe in words how extraordinary it was to be in the biomechanics group at Duke as a graduate student. Steve’s generosity, creativity, and joyfulness was a catalyst for amazing interactions and scientific advances. Thanks, Steve – our collective successes are part of your legacy.

Tatsuo Motokawa

Steve was writing ‘Axis and Circumference’ when he kindly invited me to join his research members. He was the first to come to his lab in the morning, and I was also an early bird. With a coffee cup he told me about what he was writing. When I heard that plants and animals are cylindrical in shape, I remembered the words of Paul Cezanne who wrote in his letter, “View the things in nature as cylinders or spheres or triangular pyramids.” Steve shared his view with artists.

Because the view that organisms are cylindrical is very important that even children should know, I wrote an essay about this view that appeared in the textbook of Japanese elementary schools. I also made two songs: one is titled “Organisms are cylindrical” and the other “Our palms are flat.” I visited more than one hundred elementary schools to give classes in which I sang those songs and asked pupils why our palms and ears are flat and performed some experiments to show that cylinders are strong. The textbooks in which my essay appeared was used by about 60% of the same generation of Japanese children, which means that so many Japanese children learned what Steve taught us.

Phil Motta

Throughout my undergraduate career at Duke Steve mentored me on research as well as taught me in the Biomechanics course. His input was invaluable and much appreciated.

Gordon Murdock

Steve loved and took great joy from the company of creative people (Knut Schmidt-Nielsen, Carolyn Vaughan, See-Saw Studio, Norm Budnitz, John Gosline, Mimi Koehl, Jerry Vaughan, his family, Jonathan Kingsolver, Steve Vogel, all those on your address list, and many more).  I never heard a disparaging word about an associate/student.  He was generous in his support, both moral and practical,  of talented folks he embraced.

Katy Muzik

“Glee, Rosebuds and Dogwoods, remembered 2021”

Remembering Steve, today I planted a beautiful “Yellow Twig” dogwood tree, here in my SW Oregon coastal garden. (It’s a Western species of Cornus, a variety of C. sericea, not the Eastern C. florida, a native of North Carolina and its State flower). The endeavor has comforted me, helping me to honor both Spring and Steve, and helping me to compose myself as I still grieve his departure, and to compose these words as I now celebrate my memories of him.

How gleeful and ecstatic was our SAW, expressing his delight when introducing me 5 decades ago to the springtime redbuds and dogwoods blooming alongside Duke Forest! I was astounded and enchanted then, and remain quite amazed now, just remembering his unbridled and emphatic joy. (Here are a few typically-SAW words from one of the many multi-colored letters he sent me, this one to Okinawa, dated April 2, the year he was honored to become a James B. Duke Professor and was bestowed a Chair: “Hiya Papaya…. a bright crisp Carolina Spring morning fills my heart with glee for thee, tee hee and me.”)

I know that Steve would have enjoyed the encouraging beauty of these bright yellow stems of his tree here, now, next its flowers, then its summer-y, wildly-variegated leaves and then, yes, of course, colorful!! autumn foliage. Such solace, such life, promising Spring eternal! Doubly impactful, its pretty branches remind me of the shimmery golden axial skeleton of Stephanogorgia wainwrighti, a gorgonian sea fan I discovered during our visit to Fiji in 1972, and later named with my Octocorallia mentor Dr. F.M. Bayer. (Quoting from our 1976 publication about the etymology of the new genus and new species:  Stephanos, Greek for crown, is “in allusion to the gold of which crowns may be made as well as to the proper name Stephen”. Thus Stephanogorgia, and, wainwrighti too, are scientific names “in honor of Dr. Stephen A. Wainwright, the leader of the Duke Expedition to the Fiji Islands, 1972”. Here is the reference:  Zoologische Mededelingen, 1976: Deel 50 # 5: 65-90. On page 77, Plate I, is a black and-white photo of a lovely colony I collected, not at all doing justice to its living golden gorgonian grandeur in the clear blue seas of yesteryear.)

I thank SAW for so generously having shared his wealth, his knowledge, his wine, his tea, his time, his friendship, his love and especially, his glee, with me and so many others…

Lisa Orton

Steve was all about ‘giving permission’.  I wrote it on the cup I made him when he retired.  His approach was finding out what we might be interested in doing or learning about, and then giving permission to explore the thing we most dreamed of exploring.

My first fall as a grad student, during a tutorial, he told me that he had a bit of sperm whale tail in his freezer, and invited me to a dissection party on Saturday.  He was surprised to find out later that he had handed me my pipe dream on a platter.

He hosted wine tastings where he put the prices on the bottles.  Some eye popping!  He said, ‘I want all of my graduate students to know something about fine wine when they leave my lab.’  And there were a lot of afternoon ice cream runs.

Perhaps the best thing he shared with us was each other.  I couldn’t wait to meet all who had gone before me, and who came after.

D. Ann Pabst

Things Steve Wainwright (SAW) taught me (or supported me while I found out on my own):

Always sit lower than the person you are meeting with. This simple action, which puts your fellow at ease and subtly tells them they are the most important person you could possibly be speaking with encapsulates Steve.  He did not say this to me – he showed me.

Always surround yourself with interesting and fun things – be they wonderful books, bones, pottery, glass, toys, sculptures, origami, fabrics….they make you happy, they make everyone else happy and they are openings to conversations about the world.

Bowties are the perfect accoutrement to any garb!

Work very hard and think very critically…and creatively.  Let every way that you interact with and sense the world be a portal for trying to understand it.

Let your students be fiercely independent but be there 100% when they need you.  It is a balancing act I have seen no one else do as well as Steve.

Build it!  If you think you know how a structure works, try to build it – this endeavor will illuminate what you do not know quickly and emphatically!  Then try again!

Be generous, be kind.

Most importantly, that life is beautiful.

Chuck Pell

Steve thought up the idea of The BioDesign Studio as an institute for living structures, a place where anyone could come to build tangible models of their system. Those models inevitably surprised even the most learned of us by exposing unexpected properties of any study subject. He drafted me from doing special effects out west to come set up the BDS for building (out of elastomers and fibers and goo) whatever anatomically relevant 3D working models of organisms anyone wished. SAW funded the whole thing, allowing over a hundred people (from undergrads to emeritus faculty) to come build physical models of their organisms (or interesting parts thereof). Every single person went away with novel insights into their research subjects, even if decades of study preceded their building sessions! SAW saw people as valuable for their unique perspectives and being, and I count myself extremely fortunate that Steve invited me to become an integral part of the Zoology/BLIMP mix. We are all forever changed for the better by the climate created and nurtured by The Two Steves.

Also, SAW wore the best hats, and he illuminated our world with the greatest collection of over-the-top Hawaiian shirts ever assembled. In this and many other ways, SAW set an example to help everyone to give themselves their own permission to pursue their dreams in science, art, and life. “Try it! See what happens! What if you find an answer? What changes?”

One of the best Wainwright quotes: “Natural design is worth studying, because in Nature, the Good designs eat the Bad designs! After a while, you’ve got a lot of good designs.”

A limerick about SAW, enjoyed by him at the celebration:

When faced with hyper-funicity
SAW seeks function’s complicity
Using science & art
To tease it apart
He gives us crystal simplicity!

(Note: SAW introduced many to the concept of “funicity.” English (pr. few – ni – city) Etymology. Coined by Viktor Weisskopf from the name of Ireneo Funes, a character who lost his ability to forget, in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story Funes the Memorious (Funes el memorioso, 1942). (Noun)

  1. (physics) An inbuilt quality of materials that permanently “remember” their original time and place of creation.
  2. The reflection of an object’s own history in its current form.”)

That’s a fair description of what we seek to limn in the organisms and systems we admire. SAW said that it was the visual, aesthetic spectacle that drew him to ask questions in the first place.

Gigi Roark

It’s very hard to put into words the impact that Steve has (present tense) on my life and my family. Reducing it to a few words is difficult but that was always Steve’s point – what is the question? What is the essence? As I thought about it, I decided that the essence of Steve was vibrance.  In dress, in thought, in investigation and in teaching, think vibrantly. Think across disciplines and find out what sparks your imagination and enthusiasm. What a gift to be exposed to him and all the people he gathered to share in his delight in learning. It is my job to continually pass that SAW essence on.

We all miss him but, thankfully, the SAW vibrant streak is now incredibly widespread and still growing!

Sentinel Rommel

Steve’s office was an island haven in which you could safely and uninhibitedly explore ideas: an intellectual oasis, one of the most stimulating minds I have experienced.

V. Louise Roth

Steve was both multifarious and one-of-a kind. Hard to do justice to him in words (even the thousands of them encompassed in a picture or two), but this is what comes to mind:

Steve was above all generous…in the joy he expressed for ideas and for nature, in his appreciation of aesthetic (especially visual) and analytic aspects of the natural world, in underwriting students’ research and nurturing their talents, in honoring colleagues (measuring Kingdon’s iconic camel statue, which Steve commissioned to stand next to Duke’s BioSci Building in tribute to Knut, introduces my first-year “SIZE” class to these great integrative, comparative biologists—and a camel!), in colorfully and biomorphically decorating his surroundings (and famously his own hats & shirts), and more. I picture him wheeling a lab cart stocked with fine tea, fine ceramics, and puzzling parts of organisms into a prelim exam….

Tierney Thys

“Nature reveals great secrets in her extreme forms.” Steve Wainwright illuminated my world with these simple words in my first year of graduate school. Wainwright himself, with his playful spirit, was an extreme form. He led by example, granting us the freedom to understand the natural world by catalyzing our creativity and nurturing our curiosity.  Now that’s certainly a secret worth revealing.

Janice Voltzow

Steve nurtured us with creativity, generosity, and fine wines.

Mark Westneat

Steve taught us the beauty of blending art and science and the amazing scientific benefits of conceiving wild and crazy ideas in biology. Wainwright and Vogel each independently introduced me to my life partner; they are forever friends. He supported me emotionally and materially in so many ways. The sushi we ate! Field-work and fish dissection with Steve was absolute joy. He called me Carcass Marcus.

Remembering John S. Pearse (1936-2020)

David R. Lindberg, University of California Berkeley and Douglas J. Eernisse, California State University Fullerton

John Pearse. Image courtesy of Cameron Douglas and UCSC.

John Stuart Pearse, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC), died on July 31, 2020, at the age of 84. John was the consummate invertebrate biologist, receiving his undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago and his doctorate in 1965 from Stanford University.  John was renowned for his work on echinoderms, but worked broadly across invertebrate groups, including Placozoa, Porifera, Cnidaria, Annelida, and Mollusca [see taxon bibliographies in Eernisse & Lindberg (2020) and Lindberg et al. (2020)]. Much of this diversity of research was united by his fascination with marine invertebrate reproduction, a topic that he published on throughout his career.

In addition to reproductive studies, John was also an advocate and practitioner of long-term surveys and monitoring of intertidal and nearshore subtidal habitats; one of the longest extended over 40 years at a former sewage outfall at Pleasure Point, Santa Cruz, California (Pearse et al., 2015).

John was an amazing teacher, receiving multiple teaching awards. He was mentor to a cadre of postdocs and graduate students, and to the hundreds of undergraduates who took his courses in invertebrate zoology, intertidal biology, and kelp forest ecology.  In addition, many were ‘introduced’ to the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) through John.

Service to professional societies and natural history museums also was important to John. He served as president of the Western Society of Naturalists (1983), Santa Cruz City Museum Association (1985–1986), City Board of the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History (2014–2019), the International Society of Invertebrate Reproduction (1995–1998), California Academy of Sciences (1997–2003), and the UCSC chapter of Sigma Xi (1997–1999).

At SICB John served as Program Officer (1998–2001), President (2007–2008), and Past President (2009–2011).  As program officer John and his fellow committee members re-organized scheduling of contributed oral and poster presentations. They had the divisional program officers meet to integrate presentations from different divisions into a more coherent topic-driven program for the annual meetings.  This effectively mixed the interests of many of the SICB divisions and facilitated the exchange of ideas and viewpoints, an integration which was generally lacking at meetings of more specialized societies. The restructuring reflected John’s belief that ‘cross training’ (Pearse 2003) was fundamental to the development of modern integrative and comparative biologists (see below). As president, John was also involved with the overhaul of the Society’s journal – Integrative and Comparative Biology – with the appointment of a new editor, new publisher, and the implementation of an electronic system for submission, review, editing, and acceptance of manuscripts which provided for more consistent and rapid publication of symposia (Heatwole et al. 2007).

John’s commitment to SICB corresponds well with his broadly comparative research approach and interests.  In an analysis of John’s publications in the Web of Science database, an internal algorithm categorized John’s publications into 25 non-exclusive categories, the top five being Zoology, Environmental Sciences, Ecology, Marine, Freshwater Biology, Reproductive Biology, and Physiology. These and the other 20 categories reflect John’s passionate curiosity for a legendary range of biological questions and organisms, his impressive mastery of experimental design, his global experience studying polar, temperate, and tropical faunas, and his 60 years of scholarly contributions. These categories also correspond well to SICB’s divisions and the expertise of numerous colleagues with whom he engaged at annual meetings.  SICB was also where students would often meet the venerable ‘Professor Pearse’ for the first time, while his own students would begin career-long associations with the Society.

John Pearse in the field at Pacific Grove, California. Image courtesy of Vicki Pearse.

John’s research was an outgrowth not only of his immense curiosity but also his vast and deep zoological knowledge, whether the topic of discussion involved organismal biology, community ecology, environmental activism, or cutting-edge trends in science. In his research John combined the best aspects of a field naturalist and rigorous experimentalist (e.g., Pearse et al. 1986) with the traits of an outstanding comparative biologist. However, John was never averse to change.  He worked rigorously to maximize the interactions between researchers with diverse interests and assisted with the modernization of the Society’s journal.  Lastly, John wanted to revitalize the training of modern integrative and comparative biologists (Pearse 2003) and argued for a new program that featured the training of modern naturalists. His vision was to have students and their mentors engaged in synthetic pursuits, be as comfortable in the lab as in the field, integrating widely different disciplines, approaches, techniques, and taxa, and ambitiously advancing the study of well-defined, fundamental questions.

SICB benefited immeasurably from John’s service. Like others, he envisioned a new role for 21st century naturalists, who regardless of taxon, habitat, geologic time period, or method of investigation would be well prepared to document the integrated and comparative biology of life.

For additional biographies and bibliographies see:  Pearse (2007), Hadfield (2007), and Eernisse & Lindberg (2020).  We thank Vicki B. Pearse for comments.

References

Eernisse, D. J. & D. R. Lindberg. (2020).  In Memoriam John S. Pearse. Invertebrate Biology, 2020: 139:e12309.

Hadfield, M. G. (2007).  A 70th birthday tribute to an outstanding marine biologist: John S. Pearse.  Bulletin of Marine Science, 81(2): 160–165.

Heatwole, H., N. Cochran, J. S. Pearse, & C. Kennedy. (2007). Editorial. Integrative and Comparative Biology, 47: 1–3.

Lindberg, D. R., T. M. Gosliner, D. J. Eernisse. (2020).  John Stuart Pearse (1936-2020) American Malacological Society Newsletter, (Fall 2020): 18-21.

Pearse, J. S. (2003). The promise of integrative biology: resurrection of the naturalist. Integrative and Comparative Biology, 43: 276-277.

Pearse, J. S. (2007).  The integrative and comparative underpinnings of my Antarctic research.  SICB Newsletter, (Fall 2006): 2-4.

Pearse, J. S., W. T. Doyle, V. B. Pearse, M. M. Gowing, J. T. Pennington, E. Danner, & A. Wasser. (2015). Long-term monitoring of surfgrass meadows in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary: Recovery followed by stability after the termination of a domestic sewage discharge. Marine Sanctuaries Conservation Series ONMS-15-10. U.S. Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Office of National Marine Sanctuaries. 42 pp.

Pearse, J. S., D. J. Eernisse, V. B. Pearse, & K. A. Beauchamp. (1986). Photoperiodic regulation of gametogenesis in sea stars, with evidence for an annual calendar independent of fixed daylength. American Zoologist 26: 417-431.

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