This is the first part in a series from the Mordecai lab where lab members highlight the diverse paths that led them towards careers in ecology.
Caroline is a first-year postdoc who studies global change and vector borne disease ecology. Her current projects aim to describe reservoir and host communities of zoonotic disease and environmental levers of spillover. Outside of science, Caroline enjoys backpacking, surfing (small waves), horseback riding, and reading, especially fiction by international authors.
Johannah is a first-year PhD student who is interested in how environmental change affects the ecology and evolution of species interactions. She also enjoys fiction, the visual arts, spending time outdoors, and having pets (broadly defined to include plants and edible microbial cultures).
Morgan is a second-year postdoc who models the transmission of a variety of vector-borne (Ross River virus, dengue, malaria) and directly-transmitted (SARS-CoV-2) diseases. Outside of science he enjoys birding, hiking, lifting weights, playing board games, and listening to a range of metal.
Q: How important was ecology and nature in your early life?
Caroline: I grew up in a somewhat rural area of Connecticut. As a child, I spent a lot of time wandering around the woods. I loved animals and always thought I wanted to be a veterinarian. My friend and I even started a pet-sitting business in elementary school, charging people $5 per day to watch their animals (my mom said she spent more money on gas driving me to their houses…). At some point in early high school, I lost interest in being outside and learning about nature and ecology. At the same time, I lost interest in school in general and, although I was a straight-A student until that point, started doing really poorly in a lot of my classes. My junior year, I took an environmental studies class and felt really excited to learn again (although, I’m pretty sure we only learned how to ID birds and make a tent out of a tarp?...). Based on my experience in that class, I started thinking about going to college to pursue something related to environmental studies.
Johannah: Like Caroline, I have always loved animals (and plants!), and grew up in a small town where wandering around outdoors was one of my main sources of entertainment. I was also fortunate to have incredible access to the Channel Islands National Park off the coast of Southern California. The fascinating history and ecology of these islands were at the forefront of my education and my imagination. I had an amazing elementary school teacher who brought my public school class on many incredibly fun field trips out to the islands, among other captivating and memorable ecology-related activities, like guiding us through sea urchin dissections and growing giant kelp with us in the classroom so that we could play a role in kelp forest restoration. Later on, my family regularly spent school breaks on Santa Cruz Island with Dr. Kathryn McEachern of the USGS and her family. On these trips, we volunteered as field assistants for Kathryn’s native plant community monitoring and restoration projects. These excursions had a lot going for them: Kathryn is super knowledgeable and entertaining to be around, I liked the idea of helping native plant populations recover from the damage humans have inflicted on them, and we also had to chance to do special things like stay at a cool field station and ride around the bumpy dirt roads of this majestic, uninhabited island in the back of an ancient pickup truck.
Morgan: I grew up in north-central Florida in a middle class family with three siblings, a mother that was a homemaker, and a father that was a teaching professor. What we lacked in money for extravagant vacations (like flights to Europe or ski resorts), we made up for in time because of my father’s 9-month contract. Many of my childhood summers were spent on month-long camping road trips from Florida to Maine, Michigan, the Desert Southwest, on one occasion all the way to the North-Pacific coast of California, and everywhere in between. By the time I finished high school I had been on a hike/walk and observed nature in 40 US states. While I never became truly enamored by any one aspect of nature, I did learn to ID some trees, mammals (and tracks), birds, and geological features. These trips provided the foundation for my love of nature; however, my strength in math and interest in physics and engineering led me to focus on physics, chemistry, and higher-level math (through Calc 2) in high school. Outside of class, my focus was on sports and I also did not participate in any form of club in biology, environmental science, or conservation.
Q: What did you major in in undergrad, and how did it lay the foundation for grad school in ecology? Did you consider other paths?
Caroline: By the time I started undergrad, I decided I wanted to “go into” wildlife conservation. My mom grew up in South Africa and I, very fortunately, had the opportunity to visit Kruger National Park and surrounding game parks a couple of times. I was specifically interested in international conservation, although I had a very romanticized idea of what that work actually entailed and didn’t have a clear idea of an actual career path. I started off as an Environmental Science major and, after having to take a geology lab, realized my interests were more in line with the Ecology & Evolutionary Biology (EEB) major. As an EEB major, I really enjoyed my evolution, ecology, wildlife biology, and parasitology related classes and became the most excited about the integration of these fields into disease ecology. By the time I decided to go to graduate school, I was more interested in basic science and theoretical questions than applied research. However, I still thought that at some point in my career I’d be interested in working on socio-ecological issues at the human-wildlife interface, and almost finished a double major in Anthropology (it ultimately was too expensive for me to complete both degrees so I only earned a major in EEB). As an undergraduate, I wasn’t fully aware of the field of quantitative ecology or the importance of quantitative skills as a disease ecologist. If I had known that as an undergrad, and realized earlier on that I love quantitative ecology, I think I would have double majored in EEB and Statistics (I ended up getting a minor in Statistics in grad school).
Johannah: I majored in biology, on an ecology and evolution track, though this was a departure from what I’d envisioned in the lead-up to college. I’ve always liked reading, writing, and ideas in general, so I initially thought I’d major in the humanities. Eventually, I realized that all of these things are also integral to science, and that I really enjoyed both being involved in ecology research and taking science classes that added entirely new dimensions to how I could observe the world around me. My major provided the foundation for grad school in ecology by helping me develop a strong background in biology, but my research experiences were ultimately far more important.
Morgan: In high school I was exposed to no information about the importance of quantitative skills in any form of ecological field. I therefore entered undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh as an engineering major. While I mostly enjoyed my freshman year and had plans to continue as an engineer, everything changed in the summer after my freshman year when I took a twelve-student, five-week field course in Wyoming that combined geology, paleontology, and ecology. Directly following this course I switched my major to ecology. In the summer after my sophomore year I took forest ecology and volunteered to write up the research we conducted in that course for publication. This work (with Dr. Walt Carson) allowed me to see a project from data collection through analysis and finally to publication. I learned both the satisfaction that can be gained from discovering some new piece of knowledge, but also the tedium involved in science. Through this work I was also exposed to the importance of math and stats in ecology for the first time, and was strongly advised by Dr. Carson that if I were to pursue a career in ecology that I should pursue more quantitative work. However, given my reticence about the tedium of science and some confusion about the role of quantitative work, I finished undergrad with much uncertainty about my future interest in graduate school.
Q: What or who convinced you to go to grad school to pursue a career in Ecology?
Caroline: I had really amazing mentors in undergrad. One of my Anthropology professors encouraged me to get involved in research, and I ended up working with two research groups in the EEB department at CU Boulder. Multiple people in the Safran Lab (Drs. Rebecca Safran, Liz Scardato, Joey Hubbard, and Amanda Hund) and Dr. Kika Tarsi introduced me to field and laboratory research in multiple systems and subfields of EEB. I wrote an honors thesis with the Safran Lab and helped with field work throughout Colorado, China, and Japan. Prof. Rebecca Safran was especially supportive and encouraged me to apply to graduate school. Without the support of these mentors, I definitely would not have had the confidence to pursue a career in disease ecology.
Johannah: My time as an undergraduate researcher in the Mordecai lab played a decisive role. The more progress I made on my first research project, and the more I learned about how ecology research works, the more I wanted to keep exploring this field. I worked in the lab full-time for three summers, and part-time during the school year. After I graduated, I worked for Stanford’s Conservation Program as a technician for a year, but also kept working on my research part-time. I enjoyed my technician work, but doing it for an extended period of time increased my certainty that I wanted to pursue a graduate degree and the types of career that this would open up for me. During the next year, I applied to PhD programs while working as lab manager here. Spending this much time in the lab meant that I got to interact with many excellent mentors and role models, to experience firsthand how intellectually stimulating a research environment can be, and to get a concrete idea of what life as a grad student might be like. The opportunities I had to present my research at scientific conferences were also very inspiring. These experiences shifted “the scientific community” from an abstraction into a reality that I could actually imagine being a part of, and having scientists I’d never met before take an interest in my research and help me think about it in new ways was encouraging.
Morgan: Because of my uncertainty about graduate school I decided to take one year off, during which I first spent 4.5 months in Fairbanks, Alaska as a field tech on a PhD student’s (now Prof Katie Spellman) project on invasive plants (the other seven months were spent as a trainer in the weightroom of a local YMCA). While I did not particularly enjoy the field work, I did enjoy my conversations with Dr. Spellman and her advisor (Dr. Christa Mulder). The importance of math and stats was once again reinforced by both women. Given their advice and my lukewarm interest in fieldwork, I decided to first acquire an MS in quantitative ecology (including a four-course certificate in statistics). I ended up enjoying this work immensely, and finally made the commitment to a PhD in quantitative ecology (which ended up focusing on disease ecology). Though it took me many years to find quantitative ecology, this field allowed me to combine the love of nature that I’d developed as a child with the quantitative skills I’d first developed in high school and could now dust off and greatly expand during my MS and PhD.