EEB Research Reaches Around the World

July 5, 2024 by Logan Judy

EEB Research Reaches Around the World

Map of places EEB research has drawn from

The University of Tennessee’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology has a vibrant community of researchers exploring important ecological and evolutionary questions that enrich understanding of global issues, training students to think broadly, and helping find solutions to important problems around the world. Three EEB researchers have won prestigious Fulbright awards to work and study abroad in recent years: Associate Professor Orou Gaoue, South Africa (2022-2023), Timothy Meidl, Taiwan (2022-2023), and Colton Adams, Latvia (2023-2024). Below are a few EEB faculty and students working on important questions in international locations around the world.

Professor Joe Bailey and Alivia Nytko take a phylogenetic approach to understand the evolution of rarity using the hyperdiverse genus Eucalyptus found in Tasmania, Australia. In contrast to ecological determinants of rarity, an evolutionary basis to species rarity suggests that the traits that determine rarity can be selected upon. Nytko recently won the Ecological Society of America Excellence in Ecology Award for this work.

Associate Professor Liz Derryberry and Renata Seco study the evolution of song in female antbirds, a large, diverse group of neotropical birds in the Amazon, to understand how morphology and environmental conditions are shaping song structure. Bird size, morphology, and habitat are related to song frequency and pace.

The Gaoue Lab has projects in Benin studying anthropogenic effects on plant species interactions. It has the longest-running demographic study of plants in Africa and is working on a range of questions in population ecology, ethnobiology, and species interactions with anthropogenic change.

The Giam Lab conducts research on how land-cover and land-use are changing biodiversity in the tropics. With PhD candidate Guido Herrera-Rodriguez, and a global group of researchers, lab members are building a pantropical database of fish assemblages to investigate the impact of land-cover change on stream fish in the Amazon, Afrotropics, and Southeast Asia.

The Kwit Lab is working on seed dispersal ecology of rock iguanas, the largest frugivore and seed disperser in the Bahamian archipelago. Associate Professor Charlie Kwit and his colleagues work on tourist-visited and nontourist-visited islands in the Exumas to assess the health and population dynamics of iguanas and whether supplemental feeding affects the dispersal of native seeds.

With National Science Foundation funding, Professor Brandon Matheny and his lab form national and international collaborations to collect, document, and describe the largely unidentified mushroom-forming fungi throughout the world. Matheny has described new fungal taxa from Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, North and South America, and literally from his own front yard.

White mashrooms on a dark, wet forest floor

An insect crawling on a woman's hand with greenery in the background

A bird being held by a researcher surrounded by greenery

Research in the Sheldon Lab is using field and laboratory experiments in an NSF-funded project in Ecuador to examine how changes in temperature alter the physiology of dung beetles and whether these tropical insects can shift their behavior to use cooler microclimates. Work by Associate Professor Kimberly Sheldon and her team was recently featured on CBS Saturday Morning.

Professor Daniel Simberloff and Wieteke Holthuijzen are working to determine the diet and ecological impacts of invasive house mice on islands. To predict the ecosystem response and prepare for unintended irruptions of non-native and invasive taxa, they are investigating mouse diet using a variety of molecular and stable isotope approaches.

The Stockmaier Lab studies how pathogens affect host social behaviors. The lab studies vampire bats because they are highly social and known to transmit pathogens to each other and to other agricultural animals. The fieldwork takes place at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama as well as sites in Belize and in Costa Rica.

The Hemingway Lab studies decision-making strategies in neotropical bats at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Hemingway’s research adopts principles from economics and psychology to investigate how bat species evaluate and choose between multiple feeding and mate options, and differ in decision mechanisms, based on their foraging behavior and other aspects of their ecology.

Message from the Department Head

July 5, 2024 by Logan Judy

Message from the Department Head

Scopes Centennial Celebrates Study of Evolution

In 1925, high school teacher John T. Scopes was accused of violating Tennessee’s Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution. Scopes was unsure that he had taught evolution, but he deliberately incriminated himself so the case could have a defendant, and he coached students to testify against him. He was found guilty and fined $100. The trial drew Williams Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defense, in what was a national test of the right to teach the theory of evolution. The trial was broadcast nationally and put Dayton, Tennessee, on the map.

While Darwin’s theory of evolution was well established by 1925 and supported by the rediscovery of Mendel’s work in 1900, science was a long way from a clear understanding of the biological basis of evolution, or descent with modification. The elusive language of molecular evolution, DNA, was not known as the genetic code until the 1940s, and the structure of DNA was determined in the 1960s. In the 1970s the burgeoning field of molecular evolution expanded our understanding of evolutionary processes, such as gene duplication, gene conversion and recombination, molecular selection, intragenomic conflict, transposable elements, and symbioses. Paralleling advances in our understanding of genetic architecture, advances in computing capacity gave rise to significant advances in modeling evolution mathematically (phylogenetics and beyond).

As we approach 2025, two additional factors have become critical for all life on Earth: One, our planet is warming at a pace mirrored only by past extraordinary geologic disasters; and two, we have entered a time when the extinction of species due to human activities is unprecedented (the Anthropocene). Will the processes of evolution be sufficient for organisms to adapt? Can hidden genetic diversity provide new mechanisms for survival? What kinds of genetic changes are most effective in generating novel diversity? Can symbiosis effectively change in time?

Scientists in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology are working hard to address these questions. In the 2024-2025 academic year, EEB, along with partners within the College of Arts and Sciences and across campus, will be recognizing the centennial of the Scopes Trial and celebrating the study of evolution. With a series of seminars, Darwin Day events, public talks, a new production of Inherit the Wind at Clarence Brown Theatre, and much more, EEB will be working to showcase the continued importance of the study of evolution at UT to highlight new innovations in evolutionary scholarship. Join us for as many of these events as you can; visit the EEB website, eeb.utk.edu, for a full schedule of events in the coming year.

Sincerely,

Jen Schweitzer

Multicultural Team Researching in West Africa

July 5, 2024 by Logan Judy

Multicultural Team Researching in West Africa

Photo of Orou Gaoue in the woods wearing a hat and backpack

In the Anthropocene, human activities can change the way species interact with each other and alter biodiversity. It is also important to train the next generation of scientists how to conduct complex research in the tropics where some of the highest environmental degradation is taking place and where US students often have limited opportunity to study. Associate Professor Orou Gaoue received funding from the National Science Foundation to develop a three-year International Research Experience for Students (IRES) to address these problems.

In summer 2022, Gaoue took the first five US students to Benin in West Africa to investigate the causes and demographic consequences of mutualism disruption by chronic human disturbance.

Five students from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, were recruited and paired with five Benin students to form multicultural research teams. The US students also participated in peer-led learning activities on statistical data analysis, to teach to their peers in Benin, where the field component of this project was implemented. The first week in Benin included visiting labs at the universities in Cotonou and Parakou, meeting local mentors, and teaching statistical data analysis to Benin students. This opportunity for peer-led learning was one of the highlights of the program. These peer-learning sessions reinforced students’ knowledge of statistical data analysis and presented opportunities for students from Benin and the US to bond and discuss mutual interests.

Group of students in a circle in the woods

Every year each multicultural team selected a research topic to work on from topics that are an integral part of Gaoue’s long-term research program in Benin. Students undertook field data collection in forest sites, half of which were perturbed by chronic human disturbance. Thus, students learned how to do research from project conception to data analysis and then communicated these results to mentors, faculty, and post-doctoral researchers from the University of Parakou.

Multicultural research teams collected demographic data on mahogany trees and their mutualistic weaver ants. Teams were focused on populations and behavior of the weaver ants, how harvesting by the Fulani people altered endophytes, and experimentally assessed the growth-defense hypothesis.

With opportunities to learn, teach peers, design research, collect data, and analyze data in Benin, UT students learned how to work in multicultural teams and how to navigate and conduct research in a foreign country—they also will be forever changed and enriched by this experience.

Jacob Suissa in ‘The Conversation’: “Ferns and flowers bribe helpful ant defenders with nectar, but ferns developed this ability much later – our study shows why”

June 21, 2024 by Logan Judy

Ferns and flowers bribe helpful ant defenders with nectar, but ferns developed this ability much later – our study shows why

Ants foraging for nectar on a Bracken fern (*Pteridium aquilinum*). Jacob S. Suissa, CC BY-ND

Jacob S. Suissa, University of Tennessee

Look closely at a plant in your local park, your garden or even your kitchen, and you’re likely to see some damage. Whether a caterpillar has chewed away part of a leaf or a mealybug is sucking on sap, animals are constantly feeding on plants.

Of course, herbivory, or plant predation, is not ideal for a plant’s survival. So plants have evolved many different defense mechanisms to inhibit this threat, including physical and chemical weapons. For example, cactuses arm their bodies with skin-piercing spines. Herbs such as mint, lavender and rosemary produce volatile scent compounds that can help deter herbivores.

Other plants resort to bribing personal bodyguards by secreting thick, sweet nectar.

Nectar is most commonly associated with flowers, where it is used to entice bees, birds or butterflies to move pollen from one flower to another. But other plants produce different types of nectar glands called extrafloral nectaries. Plants produce these glands to bribe ants with a sweet reward; in return, ants will defend the plant from insect herbivores.

I study plant evolutionary biology, and recently worked with fern biologist Fay-Wei Li at the Boyce Thompson Institute and Cornell University ant biologist Corrie Moreau to examine the evolution of ant-bribing defense mechanisms in plants.

We found something striking: nearly 130 million years ago, during the Cretaceous geologic period, ferns and flowering plants independently evolved ant-bribing nectar glands at roughly the same time. We figured this out by using complex algorithms to estimate the evolutionary origin and history of ferns, flowering plants and ants.

This timing is quite interesting because it was very early in flowering plant evolutionary history, but quite late in fern evolutionary history. Our work demonstrated that old dogs can learn some new tricks – and, even more importantly, how it happened in ferns.

Meeting above the ground

Plants are the primary producers of nearly all of the food supply on Earth, so virtually all living creatures rely on them for survival. For this reason, herbivory is part of life. But it also creates serious costs for many industries, from house plants to agricultural crops. Major pest outbreaks can even threaten global food security.

For all of these reasons, understanding how plants defend themselves against predators is a critical challenge.

The evolution of ant-mediated defense strategies inexorably linked two lineages across the kingdom of life. It meant that ants and plants would eventually evolve together – a process called coevolution. As one species changes, the other may change in response, and these changes can even become encoded in their genes.

Flowering plants originated in the Cretaceous period, around 150 million years ago, and our analyses demonstrated that they formed tight associations with ants early on. These flowering plants and their ant partners seemingly evolved together over time.

But ferns didn’t. While they had the potential to develop nectaries at the same time as flowering plants, they didn’t start to evolve nectaries at fast rates until they learned to live among the trees.

Ferns originally were terrestrial plants, but after flowering plants evolved into large trees, ferns jumped onto their branches as epiphytes – plants that grow on other plants, often with no attachment to the ground.

A drop of moisture on a fern leaf where it joins the stem — *Drynaria pilosa*, commonly known as basket fern, secretes nectar. Jacob Suissa, CC BY-ND

Ferns can also climb up trees, as ivy does, or create their own trunks in the case of tree ferns. This also helped ferns get into the canopy.

The fact that ferns didn’t start producing nectar for ants until they moved up into trees confused me as a fern biologist. That was, until my coauthor Corrie Moreau pointed out that most ants lived in treetops.

This made perfect sense. As ferns became canopy dwellers, they began to grow closer to ants that were already associated with nectary-bearing trees. Comingling with these ants, ferns eventually tapped into the established mutually beneficial relationship between the ants and flowering plants.

The evolution and ecology of fern-ant relationships

While our study discovered new aspects of ant-mediated plant defense, it left many questions unanswered. For instance, are some ants specializing on ferns, or are they generalists that can feed on nectar from a wider range of plants? How, exactly, did plants originally develop the physical capacity to produce extra-floral nectar? Are the genes that encode for nectary development the same between ferns and flowering plants? Is the chemistry of fern and flowering plant nectar the same?

Our study lays the foundation for further research into the evolution and ecology of these nectaries. This is important foundational science. It’s also conceivable that research in this area could contribute to breeding programs that promote nectary-mediated ant defense, reducing the need for pesticides to protect plants from predators.

Jacob S. Suissa, Assistant Professor of Plant Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Gordon Burghardt Interviewed for Atlantic Article

June 7, 2024 by Logan Judy

Ecological Society of America Awards UT Researchers

June 4, 2024 by Logan Judy

Ecological Society of America Awards UT Researchers

Michael Blum

by Randall Brown

Two Vol researchers from the UT Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) earned honors in the 2024 Ecological Society of America (ESA) Awards. These awards recognize outstanding contributions to ecology in new discoveries, teaching, sustainability, diversity, and lifelong commitment to the profession.

EEB Professor Michael Blum, associate dean for research and creative activity in the College of Arts and Sciences, shared in the ESA’s George Mercer Award, given annually for an outstanding ecological research paper published within the past two years with an early-career lead author.

EEB PhD student Alivia Nytko earned the E. Lucy Braun Award for Excellence in Ecology for her poster presentation at the 2023 ESA Annual Meeting titled, “Plant rarity related to phylogenetic divergence in biomass: Implications for ecosystem function.”

“We are so pleased that our EEB researchers have been recognized by ESA for their scientific achievements,” said College of Arts and Sciences Interim Executive Dean Robert Hinde.

Blum collaborated with lead author Megan Vahsen, a postdoctoral fellow at Utah State University, Associate Professor Scott Emrich from UT’s Tickle College of Engineering, and others on the study “Rapid plant trait evolution can alter coastal wetland resilience to sea level rise,” published in Science in January 2023. Their work calls attention to the significant role of rapid evolution in shaping how ecosystems respond to global change.

They examined a dominant coastal marsh sedge to reveal how genetically based variation in a plant’s traits can evolve rapidly and influence a marsh’s resilience to sea level rise. The team used a unique approach, growing “resurrected” plants from decades-old seeds recovered from marsh soils and employing an ecosystem modeling approach. Bridging quantitative genetics and ecosystem modeling, their study highlights the need to consider evolutionary processes in ecological forecasting.

Nytko’s winning research challenges conventional views on plant rarity by suggesting that rarity might often be an evolutionary adaptation rather than a result of environmental constraints. She used data from 25 Eucalyptus species to examine how natural selection influences plant traits that in turn shape plants’ range sizes and habitat needs. Her findings reveal that rare species are consistently smaller than their more common counterparts and that this trait has evolved multiple times across different groups. Her work highlights potential pathways for promoting conservation of rare plant populations.

“This excellence in ecology award from ESA for Alivia is fitting and well-deserved,” said Professor and EEB Department Head Jennifer Schweitzer. “Alivia is such a creative graduate student and this rarity work with Professor Bailey is innovative and has the potential to change how we think about, predict and manage rare species in nature.”

Nytko’s award is named for E. Lucy Braun, an eminent plant ecologist and one of the charter members of the ESA, studied and mapped North American forests and described them in her book, The Deciduous Forests of Eastern North America.

“It is such an achievement that two researchers in the EEB department have been honored for their work in ecology on the national stage,” said Professor Kate Jones, divisional dean for math and natural sciences. “Alivia Nytko winning the Braun Award for Excellence in Ecology and being singled out for her poster presentation at the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting is a huge honor. It is also fantastic to see my colleague Mike Blum’s work with Megan Vahsen being recognized in this way.”

ESA will present the 2024 awards during a ceremony at the society’s upcoming annual meeting, August 4–9 in Long Beach, California.

Learn more about the 2024 ESA awards.

Suissa Study Has High Hopes For Plant-Ant Partnerships

May 24, 2024 by Logan Judy

by Randall Brown

Collaborations across research disciplines can lead to unexpected breakthroughs and discoveries. Collaborations across species lead to unexpected evolutionary paths of mutual benefit.

For example, some plants have managed to recruit ant bodyguards. They produce sugary nectar on their leaves that attracts the ants, then these very territorial and aggressive ant mercenaries patrol “their” plant and sting or bite herbivores that try to eat it.

These relationships are well-documented in flowering plants, but they also occur in non-flowering ferns. This is weird news for researchers, as it has long been thought that ferns lack the nectaries for such complex biotic interactions.

Jacob Suissa, assistant professor in the UT Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, worked with colleagues at Cornell University, including fern expert Fay-Wei li and ant expert Corrie Moreau, to investigate how this phenomenon developed over the millennia. They recently published findings in Nature Communications about the evolutionary timeline and underlying factors of this interspecies partnership.

“The new elements of this work are twofold,” explained Suissa. “First, we discovered that nectaries—the structures that produce sugary nectar to attract ant bodyguards—evolved in ferns and flowering plants around the same time.”

This happened some 135 million years ago, coinciding with the rise of plant-ant associations in the Cretaceous period.

“This timing is quite spectacular given that it is very late in fern evolutionary history, nearly 200 million years after their origin,” said Suissa. “But it’s very early in flowering plant evolutionary history, nearly at the start of their origin in the Cretaceous.”

The second new element is how it all happened. Ferns originally flourished as terrestrial plants, growing on the forest floor. They transitioned in a major way in the Cenozoic Era, around 60 million years ago, becoming epiphytic, or tree dwelling, plants.

They learned some new habits on their way up.

“We discovered that as ferns left the forest floor and moved into the canopies, either as epiphytes, climbers, or tree ferns, they tapped into the existing ant-flowering plant interactions and evolved nectaries,” said Suissa.

This presents a curious dynamic in the ecological and evolutionary history of these two plant lineages. Ferns and flowering plants diverged from a common ancestor more than 400 million years ago, but then hit their stride in parallel with their nectary evolution and the mutually beneficial ant-plant tradeoff.

“This suggests that there may be some ‘rules of life’ governing the evolution of non-floral nectaries and ant-plant mutualism,” said Suissa. “This work can help future investigations by providing the evolutionary framework or backdrop for ecological, developmental, or genomic analyses.”

Read Suissa’s full paper, “Convergent evolution of nectaries in ferns facilitated the independent recruitment of ant-bodyguard from flowering plants,” in Nature Communications.

UT Researchers Dig Up Good News For Microbial Studies

May 15, 2024 by Logan Judy

UT Researchers Dig Up Good News For Microbial Studies

by Randall Brown

Post-doctoral researcher Joe Edwards and graduate student Sarah Love, both in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, published findings this spring that can save fellow researchers a lot of time and energy when storing soil samples for later study of their microbial content.

The preferred method for storing soil samples for the study of microbes has long been to freeze them to keep the DNA intact for studies that might need to extract information years down the road. The downside is the need to power these freezers and maintain facilities to house them.

Edwards and Love examined a wide array of soil samples in a project funded by the National Science Foundation and the US Forest Service. Their analysis indicates that soil stored under refrigerated or air-dried conditions can still retain the needed information for understanding microbial community composition and structure for many years.

“We wanted to show that these air-dried soils were still useful for understanding soil microbial communities,” said Edwards. “We’re using dried soil microbes from an archived national database to look at long-term, continent-wide spatial patterns in fungal communities and compare those with forest census data from all of those same plots.”

This soil database stores a history of the ecological changes in an area over long periods of time. Researchers want to study these soils with relatively new methods to build a timeline of ecological changes in fungi at the microbial level.

“This microbial sequencing technology has only been around for maybe the last 10 to 15 years or so,” said Edwards. “We don’t have very long-term trajectories for these microbiomes. The cool thing about these archives is that they were sampled more than once, so we have multiple resampling. We can look at how much of that community changes over time and get historical patterns for them, which is something really nobody has done yet.”

The results that Edwards and Love found show that dry-storage soil samples can be extremely useful for studying how soil properties and fungal communities change over longer periods, potentially up to decades.

“What we were saying in the paper is a little nuanced,” said Edwards. “We managed to maintain the environmental variance that was explained in the microbial community. The method isn’t quite as reliable if you’re just trying to track specific taxa of fungi across time. But for looking at broad patterns in community diversity and community composition, it’s useful. We can get a good idea of the overall shape of these communities as they change over space and time.”

Knowing the reliability of available archived information can help future researchers know that their samples will give them the accurate data they need.

Edwards and Love will apply the findings themselves to the next phase of their own soil research: sequencing thousands of air-dried soils from across the country. The information they find can offer important new understanding of long-term, global patterns of change.

Departmental Support Boosts NSF Awards For Graduate Students

April 26, 2024 by Logan Judy

Departmental Support Boosts NSF Awards For Graduate Students

by Randall Brown

Sam Wilhelm’s winning proposal looked at how flowering plants and pollinating bees in the southeast respond and rebound to annual wildfires.

An increasing number of Vols in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) earned awards through the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). It marks a successful effort from the department to support researchers at the graduate level.

EEB winners are Sam Wilhelm, Kate Loveday, and Keelee Pullum. Other 2024 fellowship winners across the UT College of Arts and Sciences include Gage Coon from the Department of Microbiology and Charles Bell from the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

“These are some of the most distinguished fellowships that a grad student can get,” said Stephanie Kivlin, associate professor and director of graduate studies in EEB. “It shows that our students are performing at a high level, really going above and beyond.”

The GRFP helps ensure the quality, vitality, and diversity of the US scientific and engineering workforce by supporting outstanding graduate students who are pursuing full-time, research-based graduate degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) or in STEM education.

The three new awardees this year make a total of six EEB students with GRFP fellowships, representing about 10% of the department’s current graduate students. Kivlin is excited that their student-support initiatives have garnered this high number of fellowships.

“It’s nice to see the professional development training that we’re doing in the department is really paying off for our students,” she said. “We started a mock panel to review proposals before they are submitted in 2019. Since then, we’ve had so many more proposals funded. We also have writing and presentation classes, so our students are trained in multiple skills for the workforce.”

The GRFP provides three years of support over a five-year fellowship period for the graduate education of students who have demonstrated their potential for significant research achievements.

“If you have your own funding as a graduate student, you can pursue whatever question you want,” said Kivlin. “Often those are independent of the principal investigators of the graduate labs. It springboards students’ careers then because everyone can see that they have already started doing independent research.”

Wilhelm’s winning proposal looked at how flowering plant communities in the southeast respond and rebound to annual wildfires, and how that in turn might mediate the associated bee community in the area.

“I used metacommunity theory to hypothesize that different fire regimes may support a mosaic of different plant-bee ‘interaction metacommunities’ at the landscape scale,” said Wilhelm. “I proposed to test this by comparing plant-bee interaction dynamics across multiple annual fire treatments that differ in seasonality. I am thrilled to receive this award that will allow me to continue studying native bees and conservation of the ecosystems that sustain them.”

Loveday’s proposal looked into the mechanisms that allow invasive plant species to outcompete native herbaceous understories of forests.

“The GRFP is great because the NSF funds the potential of the applicant to do research effectively, not the specific projects you write up, which reinforces my confidence in doing research,” said Loveday. “The grant gives me the opportunity to pursue research questions I am passionate to answer.”

Pullum’s project aims to test how sickness behavior and parental care are traded off in the wild and how both parent and offspring fitness are affected.

“I plan to carry out these experiments for snow buntings, a species of arctic-breeding songbirds that migrate yearly to Utkiagvik, Alaska,” said Pullum. “The funding from the NSF GRFP will allow me to focus on research and community outreach during my graduate studies.”

EEB students Dusty Prater and Trina Chou earned honorable mentions for their proposals.

In microbiology, Gage Coon’s successful GRFP project aims to develop a microbial cycle that would turn atmospheric CO2 into calcium carbonate (rocks). Charles Bell, GRFP winner in physics, proposed novel ways to detect and investigate dark matter.

Faculty Recognized for Excellence in Teaching, Service, and Academic Outreach

March 27, 2024 by Logan Judy

Faculty Recognized for Excellence in Teaching, Service, and Academic Outreach

During the 2023 UT College of Arts and Sciences faculty convocation, EEB faculty received awards for excellence in teaching, research, and academic outreach.

Benjamin Keck, Lecturer – Excellence in Teaching Awards: Lecturer

Benjamin Keck is presented with an award by Liem Tran at the Faculty Awards Ceremony

Ben Keck is an outstanding and dedicated lecturer for the University of Tennessee who has supported student learning in the classroom, in the field, and in the lab for many years. His teaching practice stands out for his high level of innovation, enthusiasm, and positive course climate.

Keck is a dedicated undergraduate teacher of both introductory biology courses and upper-level majors courses. His appointment is across two units—general biology and EEB—and he makes a huge contribution both as a teacher and a mentor to students. As the Director of the Ichthyology Collection at UT, Keck also makes outstanding contributions to community outreach efforts to highlight the diversity and importance of fishes in Eastern Tennessee.

Randy Small, Professor – Excellence in Teaching Awards: Senior

Randy Small is presented with an award by Liem Tran at the Faculty Awards Banquet

Randy Small is a full professor in EEB and has been the director for Teaching and Learning in the Division of Biology since 2019. His first rate and long-standing contributions to the educational mission of the College of Arts and Sciences makes him the perfect winner of this award. Legions of students in EEB as a department and the whole Division of Biology have benefited from Small’s dedication to student success, outstanding teaching practice, and educational vision and leadership. This award is long overdue.

Laura Alexandra Russo, Assistant Professor – Faculty Academic Outreach Award: Research & Creative Activity

Laura Alexandra Russo is presented with an award at the Faculty Awards Ceremony

Russo is an outstanding faculty member in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology whose outreach has raised the profile of UT Knoxville scientifically and to the public. Her research engages the public, community groups, state agencies, students, and others to tackle declines in bee species and other pollinators and what can be done to reverse these trends. Her approach exemplifies engaged scholarship that is conducted with and in communities.

Russo regularly leads outreach events at state parks like Seven Islands and Roan Mountain and national parks like the Great Smoky Mountains, including pollinator and plant hikes and bioblitzes in which community members find, identify, and document biodiversity. She actively engages with UT Extension, giving seminars and running outreach events at UT’s research and education centers across the state.

Elisabeth Schussler, Professor – Outstanding Service Award

Elisabeth Schussler is presented an award by Robert Hinde at the Faculty Awards Ceremony

In her role as Director of Biology Teaching and Learning, Professor Schussler ensures our students in the lower-division biology courses receive excellence instruction from our graduate teaching assistants and nontenure-track faculty.

She provides professional development opportunities for instructors to be at the top of their teaching game and it is this passion for high-quality teaching across the natural sciences that led her to build teams of faculty members across the college and university who also want high-quality instruction in lower-level courses. As Faculty Senate president, she supported the ideas of liberal arts learning through cultivation of a strong shared governance process.