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Investigating New Digital Authorities

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In the years since social media became part of our daily lives, an increased number of individuals are self-organizing online around identity, social topics, and various other interests. This transition leads to a new type of cultural authority and one that researchers are investigating to understand how the online human world interacts with the offline human world at both the individual and collective level. 

Sergey Gavrilets, Distinguished Professor in the UT Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, received a grant from the John Templeton Foundation to research the emergence of these new digital authorities on social media. The $1.2 million grant is the largest Templeton Foundation award in UT history.

“I’ve always been puzzled by how presumably reasonable people can come up with completely different strong beliefs or understandings about the same events or processes that happened or are happening in different situations affecting their personal life or our society,” Gavrilets said. “Over the last couple of years, with the 2020 elections and COVID, these differences have become particularly striking and their real and potential consequences particularly dangerous.”

The big question he wants to answer? “How are contemporary social media changing human social and cultural evolution?”

Understanding How New Authorities Develop

Gavrilets and colleague Neil Johnson from the George Washington University will leverage recent work on online behaviors to build a new understanding of how these new authorities develop and function. They will look at how these new authorities contribute to cultural polarizations and how their efforts and impacts are influenced. 

“We will study the emergence of self-organized groups spouting extremism, hate, and vaccine hesitancy within and across social media platforms,” Gavrilets said. “We will look at their structure and try to understand how its composition defines who listens and how these new identity groups emerge.”

Gavrilets, a mathematical biologist whose work focuses on human social behavior, will borrow ideas and theoretical tools from ecology and evolutionary biology and apply them to human social behaviors online. 

“This work will not only help us to understand online human social behaviors better, but also how our attitudes and beliefs are shaped,” said Gavrilets, who also is the director of the Center for the Dynamics of Social Complexity at UT.

“Misinformation about science, climate change, vaccination, COVID, and political processes and events has a potential to affect the life, prosperity, and wellbeing of everyone in a negative way,” Gavrilets said. “By understanding how new social and cultural authorities are formed online, we can develop better policies for governments and businesses to counter misinformation and simultaneously promote public understanding of science-based policies aiming to improve our life and prosperity.”

To learn more, read the full project summary online. 

About the John Templeton Foundation

Founded in 1987, the John Templeton Foundation supports research and catalyzes conversations that inspire people with awe and wonder. They fund work on subjects ranging from black holes and evolution to creativity, forgiveness, and free will. They also encourage civil, informed dialogue among scientists, philosophers, theologians, and the public at large. Their aspiration is to help people create lives of meaning and purpose and to become a global catalyst for discoveries that contribute to human flourishing.

With an endowment of $3.8 billion and annual giving of approximately $140 million, the Foundation ranks among the 25 largest grantmaking foundations in the United States. Headquartered outside Philadelphia, their philanthropic activities have engaged all major faith traditions and extended to more than 57 countries around the world.

Faculty Honored for Research, Teaching, and Service

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Each year, Dean Theresa Lee and members of her cabinet, with help from department heads, recognize faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences for their excellence in teaching, research and creative activity, and lifetime achievements. 

Due to the ongoing pandemic, however, we were unable to host the annual awards banquet in-person. Each faculty member received a plaque and congratulations from the dean. We posted a video to the college YouTube channel here, which features each faculty award winner. 

This year, eight faculty in our department received awards for their research, teaching, and service to the university. 

Faculty Academic Outreach Research Awards

The academic outreach awards recognize extraordinary contributions of faculty to the public that occur as an outgrowth of academic pursuits and are related to the university’s academic mission. The Academic Outreach Research Award recognizes faculty whose research and creative activities advance knowledge through the pursuit of their scholarly interests while simultaneously addressing community problems and issues and benefiting the scholar, the discipline, the university, and society. 

Kimberly SheldonThis year, the college awarded an academic outreach research award to Kimberly Sheldon, assistant professor of ecology, who developed a research program that is advancing knowledge while simultaneously addressing a community issue through collaboration with the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI). Sheldon makes use of insects from the Southern Appalachians, including her dung beetle system, and climate change in the region to make her outreach research activities culturally and socially relevant to the EBCI. 

Sheldon received funding from the Cherokee Preservation Foundation and the UT Office of Community Engagement and Outreach to collaborate with the EBCI and the Office of Fish and Wildlife Management to provide summer scientific research opportunities for EBCI high school students. The culturally and socially relevant research experiences that Sheldon has developed and led helps students to see the relevance of STEM literacy in their own lives as well as the number of jobs that require it.

Faculty Academic Outreach Service Awards

The academic outreach awards recognize extraordinary contributions of faculty to the public that occur as an outgrowth of academic pursuits and are related to the university’s academic mission. The Academic Outreach Service Award recognizes faculty who apply their knowledge to the benefit of the community by helping to seek solutions to community problems and issues. Defined more specifically, outreach service extends the faculty’s disciplinary expertise acquired through research, scholarship, and creative activity to the community. 

This year, the college awarded an academic outreach service award to Professor Paul Armsworth, who brings mathematical, statistical, and computational tools to bear to help organizations trying to conserve species, habitats, and ecosystems to make more effective decisions. He works with a range of state and federal agencies, local, national and international nonprofits and for-profit companies with the goal of reducing their environmental impact. 

The same commitment to help seek solutions to community problems and issues is apparent through his service both within academia and to wider society. Beyond contributions made directly through his research, his service contributions to the wider society have included serving on the science advisory council for a major synthesis center whose mission is to see scientific results deployed to improve both nature and human well-being, and serving on major taskforces commissioned by the federal government. These taskforces provided policy guidance on how public lands should be valued in the federal balance sheet and how best to help fish, wildlife, water, land and people adapt to a changing climate.

“When there are so many great examples of outreach and service being undertaken within the College of Arts and Sciences, I feel really honored to have the scholarship that my students, colleagues, and I undertake highlighted in this way,” Armsworth said. “People sometimes talk about outreach and service as something distinct they do alongside their teaching and research. But I’ve always seen the three as a single package. The most interesting opportunities for teaching and research always seem to arise when we roll our sleeves up and look for ways to help people address the pressing, real-world challenges we face in society.”

Faculty Academic Outreach Teaching Awards

The academic outreach awards recognize extraordinary contributions of faculty to the public that occur as an outgrowth of academic pursuits and are related to the university’s academic mission. The Academic Outreach Teaching Award recognizes faculty who extend the university’s instructional capacity to provide learning opportunities to public audiences through workshops, public lectures, and other educational activities. Faculty may also perform outreach teaching by extending their classroom beyond the campus to engage their students in service learning.

This year, the college awarded an academic outreach teaching award to Jessica Budke, assistant professor and director of the University of Tennessee Herbarium. In her role of Herbarium director, Budke is training a new generation of undergraduate and graduate students in the preservation and use of natural history collections, welcoming community volunteers to work in the collection, and driving new approaches to update and make the collection even more useful to the academic and non-academic communities that it serves. She developed an internship program where undergraduate students receive credit in an independent study course for learning and applying curatorial skills that includes collecting, processing, preserving, cataloging, and filing of specimens in the herbarium natural history collection. She also encourages citizen science in the herbarium, welcoming community volunteers to be involved in work ranging from basic specimen processing to digitization and databasing of specimen data.

“I feel especially honored to have received this award from the college,” Budke said. “My teaching outreach has broadly focused on expanding people’s vision of natural history collections. They are often thought of as dusty collections of curiosities, but are actually dynamic resources we are using to answer important questions about conservation, invasive species, climate change, and discovering species new to science. I enjoy sharing hands on experiences with specimens that get people excited about learning more about them and engaging with them through online citizen science activities.”

Outstanding Service Award

Nina FeffermanNina Fefferman, professor of ecology, received the Outstanding Service Award, which recognizes extraordinary service in advancing the mission and goals of the college. 

During the past year, Fefferman took on an impressive level of service related to her expertise in modeling epidemiological events – specifically the COVID-19 pandemic. This work is a logical extension of her earlier work examining Zika and other mosquito-driven disease transmissions, the evolution and spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria, Lyme disease risk, human cooperation in vector control, etc. As a result of her current work, she is also publishing several papers related to pandemic mitigation in a number of types of communities, as well as leveraging insights from prior similar events. 

She served the university by advising the COVID-19 Re-Imagining Fall Task Force and continued to monitor and model the COVID-19 infection data in the fall semester. Fefferman has been interview by six different television outlets, five podcasts, and numerous print media during the past year. She has managed this enormous service while continuing to manage six active grants, undergraduate and graduate students, as well as post-doctoral scholars. 

“I’m very grateful to receive this award,” Fefferman said. “This award reminds me how grateful I am to be in a community that inspires us to care about each other and work, in whatever capacity we each can, for each other’s lives to be better.”

While her level of service has been very high and extremely important in the last year, Fefferman has provided exceptional service to NIMBioS, NSF and NIH, and in a variety of editorial roles over the years, in addition to ongoing public service through public presentations and consultation with various organizations, including ACLU, Vera Institute of Justice, State of Vermont, and ongoing service to the CDC since 2009.

Excellence in Research Award/Creative Achievement Awards

We seek to recognize faculty members who excel in scholarship and creative activity while also being fully engaged in the other responsibilities of faculty jobs, primarily teaching and service. To this end, the college honors faculty in three stages of their research careers – early, mid, and senior – with awards for excellence in research or creative achievement, as well as honoring a faculty with an award for Distinguished Research Career at UT.

Brian O’Meara, professor of ecology, received a mid-career research award. O’Meara is an international leader in the creation, development, and application of phylogenetic methods to answer fundamental questions about the Tree of Life. His work in the areas of parameter inference in phylogenetic models and the study of macroevolutionary processes, particularly the association between diversification rates and continuously distributed trait evolution, is outstanding. He develops cutting edge statistical models, implements them in freely available software, and discusses their interpretation stressing their strengths and limitations in his publications. Further, he applies these methods to important problems in evolutionary biology, resulting in his exceptionally high impact in the field broadly, with contribution in both theory and practice. 

His contributions have pushed the theoretical underpinnings of phylogenetic theory forward in concert with development of methods. Due to the explosion in size of gene sequence-based comparative datasets and the rapid growth in computing power, phylogenetic models have necessarily become more complex. O’Meara is a clear leader among only a handful of scientists worldwide that have been developing and implementing such models. He is the recipient of $2.89M in external support. He has a prolific track record of mentoring in his 12 years at UT. He has mentored 16 postdoctoral fellows and graduated four PhD students who have gone on to successful careers.

“Brian is a generous collaborator with his mentees and members of the EEB community and beyond,” said Susan Kalisz, head of the EEB department. “He is a leader in EEB, serves as associate head, chairs the departmental Diversity and Inclusion Committee, and was recently elected president of the Society of Systematic Biologists.”

Karen W. Hughes, professor of ecology, received the Distinguished Research Career at UT award. Hughes is an internationally recognized scientist. Early in her career, Hughes brought her knowledge of plant tissue culture to the study of fungi, culturing individual fungal spores collected from wild populations across the globe and testing their breeding compatibility. She demonstrated that populations of fungi from different continents – originally considered the same species – represent distinct species unable to interbreed. Her findings transformed how mycologists view fungal species, demonstrating more extensive fungal diversity previously recognized. 

Her early work foreshadowed the revolution in molecular phylogenetics using DNA sequence-level data and she continues to extend these findings. Key to her success is her ability to coordinate multiple collaborators, including students, colleagues, and the public. Recently, Hughes spearheaded an NSF-funded research coordination network of 100 scientists called Deep Hyphae, which led to a major reassessment of the evolutionary history of fungi based on molecular phylogenetic data. Most recently, Hughes secured NSF funding to investigate fungal response to the Gatlinburg wildfires and coordinated and trained forays of professional and amateur (Discover Life in America and GSMNP interns) mycologists to collect post-fire fungi. One early finding reveals that some collections were unique, fire-adapted fungi, which persist within mosses and liverworts for long periods of time, then reproduce and spread when the habitat experiences a fire. Because fungi play critical roles as mutualistic partners in the roots of most plants, as well as in ecosystem functioning, her results have important applications in forestry and basic ecological studies. Hughes has been an exemplar of leadership, research, teaching, and outreach throughout her 47 years at UT.

James R. and Nell W. Cunningham Outstanding Teaching Award 

The James R. and Nell W. Cunningham Outstanding Teaching Award recognizes faculty excellence in teaching. The honor is awarded to a tenured faculty member who demonstrates outstanding classroom teaching. This year, the college recognized Edward Schilling and Urmila Seshagiri for their outstanding teaching. 

Often when we envision a professor who has been teaching for more than 40 years, we think of yellowed note pads or dull lectures. Edward Schilling, professor of ecology, was nominated for this award because as teaching circumstances evolve, so does he, and these changes are solely because of his dedication to student engagement and learning in his courses. His teaching has always been exemplary, but he has shown great adeptness at transitioning to online teaching over the last year that students have truly appreciated. 

As someone who has observed his teaching said, “he takes great pains to make the material he teaches relevant and connected to issues students care about, whether it’s biodiversity, or agriculture, or being able to identify plants in the field. Ed meets the students where they are, and leads them to greater understanding and appreciation for biology.”

In all of his teaching feedback there are consistent themes about his teaching: Professor Schilling is incredibly organized and well prepared and provides students with a hands-on and immersive educational experience because he believes that students who are engaged with the material are more likely to learn the material. 

“It was an incredibly uplifting feeling to learn that I had been selected to receive the Cunningham Teaching Award,” Schilling said. “UT has many outstanding teachers, so to be recognized in this way is truly an honor that I will cherish.”

Faculty Advising Awards

The college recognizes excellence in undergraduate advising, providing rewards for past achievements and encouraging future resourceful and creative efforts in undergraduate advising.

Jennifer Schweitzer, professor of ecology, is recognized for serving as a tireless advocate for undergraduates within her department. Her commitment to student success is demonstrated through her relationships with individual students as well in her associate head role where she ensures that the student experience is the focal point of all conversations regarding curriculum development, teaching rotation, and advising practices. Recently, she developed a resource for the faculty titled “Best Practices in Advising/Mentoring” to assist all faculty in their mentor role with undergraduates. 

Schweitzer also serves as an outstanding mentor to the students in her research lab, where more than 80 percent of the undergraduates who have worked with her have gone on to graduate or professional school.  

“Great mentors bring undergraduates into their lab and involve them in all aspects of being a scientist,” Kalisz said. “A really outstanding mentor like Jen goes above and beyond by mentoring in professional development, choosing a career path, getting into graduate school, navigating work-life balance, and being a woman in science.”  

Kalisz also notes Professor Schweitzer is one of the only faculty members she knows who has a list on their CV of all of the undergraduate students she has advised, including the time span of the relationship and whether or not the student graduated.

“Advising students at UT is such an important part of my job and one that I truly love,” Schweitzer said. “In helping EEB students navigate the biology-EEB curriculum and gain professional development skills I hope we are assisting students in finding and reaching their career goals so they can make a difference in the world. EEB students are so motivated, work so hard, and have such high aspirations for themselves and their futures. It is amazing to see all they achieve. I am very proud to be part of this department and grateful for this kind award.”

Congratulations to all our faculty on your outstanding achievements!

Singing in a Silent Spring

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Birds respond to a half-century soundscape reversion during the COVID-19 shutdown

Liz DerryberryWhen the novel coronavirus swept across the country, forcing most businesses to close their doors and people to stay home as a measure to stop the spread, people looked to the little things for signs of hope. For Elizabeth Derryberry, hope came in the form of songbirds.

Like most people during spring 2020, Derryberry focused on keeping her family safe and healthy and balancing work and homeschooling. When she saw photos of an empty Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, however, her scientific curiosity kicked in.

“When I saw those photos, it struck me just how little traffic there was in the city,” said Derryberry, an associate professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB). “I was curious to find out if this meant it was much quieter and what that might mean for the songbird I study.”

Actions taken to control the COVID-19 pandemic reduced motor vehicle traffic, potentially alleviating auditory pressures on animals that rely on sound for survival and reproduction. Derryberry, working with fellow EEB professor Michael Blum, collaborated with a team from California Polytechnic State University, George Mason University, and UT to evaluate if and how songbirds might respond to the newly emptied acoustic space that resulted from fewer people on the road.

Their findings, recently published in Science, were based on a comparison of soundscapes and songs of the white-crowned sparrow across the San Francisco Bay Area prior to and during the recent statewide shutdown. The researchers also looked at singing performance, evaluating how acoustic qualities important for mate attraction and territorial defense shifted to accommodate background noise conditions.

White Crowned sparrow

For more than a decade, Derryberry has recorded birds in San Francisco to study how noise affects bird song. In 2012, she began working with David Luther, an ecologist and assistant professor of biology at George Mason University, to study the effects of noise pollution on the sparrows. This involved recording noise and bird song from both urban and rural sites across the San Francisco Bay Area from April through June of 2016.

Jennifer Phillips, who completed her doctorate with Derryberry, captured noise and song recordings from the same areas in April and May of 2020 while working as a postdoc at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. This allowed Derryberry and her collaborators, including UT research scientist and data analyst Graham Derryberry, to draw comparisons to pre-pandemic conditions.

The team found that the dramatic reduction of human movement during the shutdown had effectively erased a half-century of urban noise pollution. Not only had traffic, as evidenced from Golden Gate Bridge records, returned to levels not seen since 1954, but also there were no longer differences in noise levels between densely urban areas of San Francisco and rural Marin County.

The researchers also found that white-crowned sparrows responded by producing songs at lower amplitudes, but because it was so quiet, they were able to maximize communication distance.

“When the noise levels dropped, birds sang more softly,” Luther said. “Even though they sang more softly, their songs travelled twice the distance because it was so much quieter.”

This also meant that people could hear effectively four times more birds than usual and helps explain media reports suggesting that bird songs sounded louder during the shutdown. Birds sounded louder because people could hear more of them.

This study illustrates how noise pollution impacts communication during normal conditions.

“Our study substantively advances fundamental understanding of animal behavior,” Derryberry said. “We observed changes in behavior during the COVID-19 shutdown that went far beyond those that have been documented in small scale, short term manipulations of the noise environment – both in captivity and in the wild. In fact, we demonstrated for the first time that prior work does not accurately predict wildlife responses to landscape-scale remediation of noise pollution. Our research provides a more accurate description of this relationship.”

Derryberry will continue navigating the uncertainties the novel coronavirus brings with it, but appreciates the silver lining of this study and the hope that it brings.

“COVID-19 has been devastating in many ways for our society,” Derryberry said. “The loss of human life alone is overwhelming. It’s a testament to people though that there are still bright spots amid such loss. One of those bright spots has been how much more people are noticing birds, particularly in cities, around the world. I hope this study seizes this moment to highlight how much noise affects wildlife and how noise is one form of pollution that people can directly address in ways that can rapidly and dramatically change the quality of life for wildlife.”

Read the study online.

Budke Receives NSF Collaboration Grant to Digitize Lichens and Bryophytes

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Across the planet’s terrestrial surface lives a layer of organisms that cannot be seen with the naked eye. Lichens and bryophytes are hosts to these cryptobiotic communities that play a critical role in stabilizing soil, preventing erosion, absorbing rainfall, and providing nutrients for the growing plants around them. This hidden life creates a critical miniature forest that serves as an important habitat for tiny animals and forms a “living skin” found throughout the world, from canyon deserts to polar icecaps.

Budke

Jessica Budke, director of the UT Herbarium (TENN) and her colleagues from 25 institutions across the United States received a grant from the National Science Foundation to image and digitize associated metadata for close to 1.2 million lichen and bryophyte specimens housed in their collections.

“Natural history collections are a physical record of our planet’s biodiversity across space and time,” said Budke, who is also an assistant professor in the UT Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. “These specimens not only serve as records of the past, but they are a critical resource for our future. They help us to answer important questions surrounding invasive species, conservation biology, and help us to describe species that are new to science.”

The project, Building a Global Consortium of Bryophytes and Lichens: Keystones of Cryptobiotic Communities (GLOBAL), will enable researchers from around the world to access specimen metadata and photos of the plants. Budke is the lead principal investigator for the project.

“For the first time we will be taking photos not just of the label information, but also the physical organisms, which will enable researchers to digitally peek inside the packet to collect data from these specimens remotely,” Budke said. “The more data about these specimens that is available online enables researchers to expand the scope and impact of their research questions.”

plantsThe UT Herbarium is one of the largest plant natural history collections in the southeast with more than 640,000 specimens, including more than 180,000 mosses and lichens.

“Digitization is a game changer,” said Eric Tepe, curator of the Margaret H. Fulford Herbarium at the University of Cincinnati, one of the institutions involved in the project. “For centuries, natural history collections have been locked up in museums, available only to a handful of visitors. Large-scale digitization efforts, like this project, open the museum doors to the world, making specimen data and, in many cases, images freely available to everyone.”

Researchers with the project will partner with Zooniverse, a citizen science web portal, to develop an online platform for citizen scientists to make observations on character traits that can improve the information and fill in some of the gaps not covered by the scientific labeling process.

These integrated data will form a critical resource for evolutionary and ecological studies that researchers hope will lead to a deeper understanding of the role bryophytes and lichens play in carbon and nitrogen cycling, the evolution of biodiversity, and more.

In addition to collecting information about the specimens, undergraduate students at the partner institutions will have an opportunity to receive funding for professional training in image capture and processing, digitization, and collections management. Researchers will leverage local resources to promote underrepresented students in STEM fields and integrate a public outreach component to K-12 science classes and other science youth groups.

“This project represents a collaborative effort of 25 major research institutions,” Budke said. “It will push the field of organismal biology forward by leaps and bounds, enabling us to tackle large-scale biology questions that none of us could answer alone.”

Partner Institutions

Kwit, Graduate Students’ Research Featured in Science

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Charles KwitCharles Kwit, assistant professor of ecology, and his graduate students Chloe Lash and Chelsea Miller studied the microbial communities of seeds to discover what role ants play in seed dispersion. They looked at wild ginger, bloodroot, and twinleaf.

Read more about their research and the role ants play in forest ecology in a recent Science article, Don’t crust that ant – it could plant a wildflower. 

Kalisz Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

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susan kaliszSusan Kalisz, the College of Arts and Sciences Excellence Professor and head of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, is a newly elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences class of 2020.

“I am honored to join such a distinguished group of scholars and leaders in the arts and sciences,” Kalisz said. “It’s still a bit of a shock, but a wonderful piece of good news during the uncertain time we are all experiencing.”

The Academy announced its newest members April 23, 2020, with the election of 276 artists, scholars, scientists, and leaders in the public, non-profit, and private sectors.

“The members of the class of 2020 have excelled in laboratories and lecture halls, they have amazed on concert stages and in surgical suites, and they have led in board rooms and courtrooms,” said Academy President David W. Oxtoby. “With today’s election announcement, these new members are united by a place in history and by an opportunity to shape the future through the Academy’s work to advance the public good.”

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences was founded in 1780 by John Adams, John Hancock, and others who believed the new republic should honor exceptionally accomplished individuals and engage them in advancing the public good.

Two hundred and forty years later, the Academy continues to dedicate itself to recognizing excellence and relying on expertise – both of which seem more important than ever.

“We congratulate these incoming members of the Academy for excelling in a broad array of fields; we want to celebrate them and learn from them,” said Nancy C. Andrews, Chair of the Board of Directors of the American Academy. “When Academy members come together, bringing their expertise and insights to our work, they help develop new insights and potential solutions for some of the most complex challenges we face.”

The Academy’s projects and publications are focused on the arts and humanities, democracy and justice, education, global affairs, and science.

Current Academy members represent today’s innovative thinkers in every field and profession, including more than 250 Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners.

The new members join the company of Academy members elected before them, including Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton in the eighteenth century; Ralph Waldo Emerson and Maria Mitchell in the nineteenth; Robert Frost, Martha Graham, Margaret Mead, Milton Friedman, and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the twentieth; and – in the past two decades – Antonin Scalia, Michael Bloomberg, John Lithgow, Judy Woodruff, and Bryan Stevenson.

International Honorary Members include Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Laurence Olivier, Mary Leakey, John Maynard Keynes, Akira Kurosawa, and Nelson Mandela.

The complete class of 2020 is listed here.

Gavrilets Receives Army Research Grants

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Sergey Gavrilets, a distinguished professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, has received more than $1.1 million in grants from the Army Research Office for study into societal resilience using evolutionary models and theories of revolution.

Gavrilet’s research is funded by the Department of Defense’s Minerva Program, which is dedicated to predicting future socio-political crises in the world and societies’ resilience to various political, economic, environmental, and health-related shocks.

“I work with mathematical models to develop a theory that hopefully will be useful to predict or identify certain problems or uncover gaps in our knowledge,” Gavrilets said. “I used to work a lot in biology and biological evolution, but lately I’ve shifted towards social and cultural evolution and behavior.”  

By using new and improved modeling tools, analysts will be able to assess political stability risks, improving predictions and explanations for societal unrest.

“The reason why we want to do this is because life is getting pretty complicated, especially over the last 10 to 20 years,” he said. “Conflicts are popping up in different places and usually come completely unexpected. Naturally, everyone wants to understand them better and hopefully predict them.”

Gavrilet’s research will also yield theoretical and modeling approaches with applications in fundamental sciences such as psychology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology.

–By Kelly Alley

The University of Tennessee wishes to acknowledge Lisa Troyer at the Army Research Office for supporting these projects.

Kivlin Coauthors Article on Fungal Aerobiota

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Stephanie KivlinStephanie Kivlin, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, coauthored a paper titled “Fungal aerobiota are not affected by time nor environment over a 13-y time series at the Mauna Loa Observatory,” published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers used 13 years of collected air samples from Mauna Loa Observatory on Hawaii Island to determine if local or global environmental factors influence fungi composition.

“One of the big questions in microbial ecology is trying to figure out how microbes disperse around the world and if they can disperse everywhere,” Kivlin said.

Kivlin and other researchers from the University of Hawaii initially genetically sequenced fungal spores and studied their traits, such as size and shape, before discovering the role wind patterns play in fungal spore dispersal.

“What we found was that we could trace back wind patterns to try to understand where the wind was coming from that deposited the fungal spores on the filters,” Kivlin said. “We saw some that were coming from Asia, bringing fungi that are never found in Hawaii. The wind patterns are really what’s blowing the fungi around.”

The researchers also discovered that some airborne fungal spores are still viable after traveling long distances.

“Because we found a couple of fungi that were dispersing all the way across the Pacific Ocean, we need to really consider how far fungi can go and what that means for dispersal of new pathogens into new areas,” Kivlin said. “We need to have better theory about how often those dispersal events occur, which fungi are coming, and if they are beneficial or harmful.”

Coauthors on the paper include Laura Tipton, Anthony Amend, and Nicole Hyson from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Erin Datlof from the University of Hawaii at Hilo, Geoffrey Zahn from Utah Valley University, and Patrick Sheridan from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Global Monitoring Division.

By Kelly Alley