UT Researchers Receive NSF CAREER Awards for Science, Engineering
Two researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, have received prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER awards to help them establish a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.
Stephanie Kivlin, an associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Wei Wang, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering, join the NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, which supports the nation’s best early-career faculty and recognizes their promise as academic role models in research and education.
Ecological Society of America Awards UT Researchers
Ecological Society of America Awards UT Researchers
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.
Suissa Study Has High Hopes For Plant-Ant Partnerships
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.
Faculty Recognized for Excellence in Teaching, Service, and Academic Outreach
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
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 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
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
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.
Kimberly Sheldon’s Research Featured on CBS
Kimberly Sheldon’s research on climate change effects on dung beetles was featured on CBS Saturday Morning, as part of a segment on insect declines in the Anthropocene.
Simberloff Honored by British Ecological Society
Each year, the British Ecological Society (BES) recognizes 11 distinguished ecologists whose work has benefited the scientific community and society in general.
Daniel Simberloff, the Gore Hunger Professor of Environmental Science in the UT Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, received an honorary membership – the Society’s highest honor – for his “exceptional contribution at the international level to the generation, communication, and promotion of ecological knowledge and solutions.”
“I have been an avid reader of BES journals since my earliest graduate school days,” Simberloff said. “My extensive research on Charles Elton led me to a greater appreciation of the leading role BES plays in shaping the direction of ecological research. I am humbled and deeply grateful that the Society would confer such an honor on me.”
Simberloff’s research focus is invasion biology, community composition, and the structure of organisms in specific features. One long-term project in Patagonia he has worked on involves invasive conifer trees and the introduction of deer, boar, and fungi. Almost a century ago, non-native tree species were introduced to a cleared section in the middle of a native forest in an attempt to establish a forestry industry on Isla Victoria, an island in the middle of Lake Nahuel Huapi. Only seven of the original species spread in number beyond the plantations.
“Our research shows that absence of suitable mycorrhizal fungi in the native forest keeps many of the non-native species from spreading,” Simberloff said. “Boar introduced in 1999, however, are exacerbating the invasion by rooting for fungal mycelium. Also, two species of deer introduced long ago may be aiding the spread.”
Simberloff became fascinated with nature during his childhood in rural Pennsylvania, but it was his time at Harvard College that got him hooked on ecology.
“I was seduced by the aesthetics and challenge of mathematics, but a non-majors biology course and an entomology course steered me back into biology and to the laboratory of Edward O. Wilson, who advised my doctorate: a test of the equilibrium theory of island biogeography with the arthropod communities of small mangrove islands,” Simberloff said. “This research and interactions with Wilson and Robert MacArthur, who served as a member of my doctoral committee, led me to a lifelong interest in the community level of organization – which species are found together, which are not found together, and why.”
Simberloff, along with Robin Chazdon, University of the Sunshine Coast, in Australia and Monica Turner, University of Wisconsin-Madison, joined the BES Honorary Membership roster, which includes British Ecologist Sir David Attenborough.
This year, there are winners across five continents, representing the international membership of the BES. Learn more about the 2023 BES award winners.
Blum Named Associate Dean for Research and Creative Activity
https://artsci.utk.edu/blum-named-associate-dean-for-research-and-creative-activity/