Department NewsMessage from the chair
From the Fall 2011 issue of Natural Selections
Dear Friends,
As you’ll see, this issue of Natural Selections is dedicated to the 10th anniversary of EEB. We had a good time looking through photo archives and dusting off some of the old photos from years gone by. See who you can recognize. John Vandermeer is our faculty member with the longest tenure at 41 years and as such, he was a great reservoir of information and memories for our articles. Thanks, John, and to everyone else who contributed to this special issue.
I have been in the department for 28 years and have seen many positive changes over that period of time. It is my great pleasure to work with an exceptional faculty, who you’ll read more about in this issue. Even though we can’t name them all here, each and every member of our faculty makes a contribution to who we are and what gives us strength in a wide variety of research areas and in educating our next generation. I am proud of our promising postdoctoral fellows, creative graduate students, enthusiastic undergrads and a staff that keeps many, many wheels running smoothly and efficiently. We have been fortunate to add to the administrative ranks a graduate program assistant and recruiter to help us with our outreach and diversity efforts and a communications specialist who keeps us informed via our wonderful website and newsletters and has helped to get our research publicized much more widely than ever before, both in the national media and within the university.
Be sure to read our cover story, “A decade of positive changes” for information about how our department has changed in the last ten years. As chair, I have been lucky enough to be closely involved in hiring 20 new faculty and they represent an extraordinary collection of cutting-edge researchers AND teachers. For example, we have revitalized plant evolutionary biology after a number of retirements in the 90s and early 2000s, by hiring Professor Paul Berry as director of the Herbarium, as well as Professors Yin-Long Qiu in phylogenetics and evolution of early land plants, Chris Dick in molecular ecology and population genetics of tropical trees, and Stephen Smith in “mega” phylogenetics.
We have made a series of spectacular hires in the study of evolutionary processes: Professor George Zhang in molecular and genomic evolution, Professor Lacey Knowles in speciation and phylogeography, Professor Patricia Wittkopp in the evolution of development, Professor Alex Kondrashov in evolutionary and population genetics, Professor Elizabeth Tibbetts in evolution of behavior, Professor Tim James in the evolution of mating systems and Professor Dan Rabosky in macroevolution. Professor Catherine Badgley, paleontologist and paleoecologist, has given us a deep time perspective on evolution. In ecology, in addition to the theoreticians noted in our cover story, we have added Professor Knute Nadelhoffer, who is also director of the Biological Station, and Professor Mark Hunter, who integrates ecosystem ecology with population dynamics and chemical ecology.
Other stories in this issue focus on students then and now, changes in the Museum of Zoology and the Herbarium, and ways in which the disciplines of ecology and evolution have changed, driven in part by major improvements in technology, such as DNA sequencing capacity and computational speed.
Don’t miss our back cover, where we provide some comparisons of our department statistics now and then that show what our graduates are doing now and how our student body and faculty have become increasingly diverse, a better reflection of the community at large. We have a ways to go in that regard, but there’s always the next decade and the next.
Finally, I wanted to add a personal note on my ten years as chair of EEB. One of the mythologies in academia is that becoming an administrator is “going over to the dark side!” But for me, it has been a tremendous privilege to work with not only the wonderful people within the department but with the faculty and staff across the great college of LSA and, indeed, all of U-M. This is a truly great university, with tremendous commitment to the core values of scholarship, lifelong learning, and inclusiveness.
We hope you enjoy this journey back in time and the glimpse at what lies ahead. Stay in touch and I wish you a happy and healthy new year!
Warm regards,
We are currently seeking long-term support for various initiatives that are underway within EEB that aim to strengthen and diversify students in the biological sciences.
