From Plant Press, Vol. 8, No. 4 from October 2005.
In August, Jun Wen formerly at the Field Museum of Natural History joined the Department as an Associate Curator, the first new curator the Department has hired in 13 years. Since 1985, Wen has been conducting monographic, phylogenetic, biogeographic, and ethnobotanical studies on Asian and New World disjunct plants. Her research employs herbarium, field, and laboratory approaches as well as various modern analytical methods to understand the taxonomy, patterns, and processes of diversification of disjunct plant groups.
Wen is a broadly trained botanist and evolutionary biologist, working on various genera in a large number of plant families. She has made extensive botanical collections (over 8,000 collection numbers) and also helped build (through gifts and exchanges) new collections of over 8,000 specimens for the Field Museum Herbarium in the past three years, primarily from China, Vietnam, and India. She is also interested in developing more projects on biodiversity inventory and conservation studies. Wen has traveled extensively throughout the world, conducting field studies and collections in the Canada, Chile, China, Costa Rica, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, the Philippines, Thailand, United States, and Vietnam.
Born in the Chinese province of Hubei, Wen received a B.S. in Forestry from CentralChinaAgriculturalUniversity at Wuhan in 1984, and a Ph.D. in Plant Biology from the OhioStateUniversity in 1991. After completing a two-year postdoctoral position at the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard University, she moved to the Smithsonian Institution in 1994 as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Botany and the Laboratory of Molecular Systematics. In 1995, she joined the staff of the Department of Biology at Colorado State University as Assistant Professor and Curator of the Herbarium. In 2000, she moved to Chicago where she began her work as Associate Curator at the Field Museum.
Wen also serves as an Adjunct Professor at the Institute of Botany, the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China, and an adjunct faculty member at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois, Chicago. In 2002 she was awarded Honorary Member of the Indian Association of Angiosperm Taxonomy, India. Wen has over 82 publications to her name, in addition to translating from English into Chinese a Rapid Biological Inventory of the southern Gaoligongshan in Yunnan, China with Chinese colleagues.
Wen’s research interests can be placed into six broad categories. The first is the monographic, phylogenetic, biogeographic, and ethnobotanic study of flowering plants. Her focus has been on the ginseng family (Araliaceae) and the grape family (Vitaceae). Her work on Araliaceae was initiated in 1985 during her dissertation research at OhioStateUniversity, emphasizing the systematics and biogeography of Aralia L. After completing her doctoral studies, she expanded her work on Araliaceae. She has made excellent progress toward understanding the phylogeny of the family in the last few years at various levels, through independent as well as collaborative work in her lab and Greg Plunkett’s lab at the Virginia Commonwealth University, in collaboration with Pete Lowry (Missouri Botanical Garden) and Anthony Mitchell (Massey University, New Zealand). She recently published two family-wide molecular phylogenies of Araliaceae. She is now expanding the effort for a three-marker phylogeny, with a focus on the biogeography of the family.
Wen plans to continue her studies in Araliaceae. She is going to treat Dendropanax, Oreopanax, and Aralia for the Flora Neotropica project. Dendropanax consists of approximately 75 species with about 25 in tropical Asia and 50 species in the Neotropics. This genus thus shows a very unusual biogeographic disjunction. Oreopanax is endemic to the Neotropical region. The Taiwanese Sinopanax, however, was recently shown to be sister to Oreopanax. In addition, fossils of Oreopanax were reported from North America. The genera are two of the least known genera in Araliaceae, and modern studies of these groups are very much needed. Through basic taxonomic work, the two groups can be employed to examine the biogeographic diversification patterns in the Neotropics, the Caribbean region, and tropical and subtropical Asia.
In the past five years, Wen has been collecting specimens of the Vitaceae during her field expeditions on other projects. When selecting her dissertation project, she became interested in two Asian – North American disjunct genera: Parthenocissus and Ampelopsis of Vitaceae. She intends to expand her work on Vitaceae, a poorly understood family with a similar distributional pattern to that of Araliaceae, with an excellent fossil record. Two years ago, a visiting scientist, Akiko Soejima from Osaka Prefecture University of Japan, spent her sabbatical leave at the Field Museum, where she helped Wen assemble a large molecular phylogenetic dataset of Vitaceae. So far, they have obtained molecular sequences for 110 species of Vitaceae, representing all genera except the monotypic genus Acareosperma endemic to Laos. She plans to gradually conduct more work on Vitaceae.
Recently Wen began working with Mike Dillon (Field Museum) on the systematics and biogeography of Nolana (Solanaceae), the largest plant genus of the Atacama and Peruvian deserts. They plan to use Nolana as a model to examine the patterns of biogeographic diversification and speciation history in these deserts. She will head for Peru in November this year to hunt for Nolana.
Wen’s second major area of interest is the biogeography of the northern hemisphere and the biogeographic relationships between temperate and tropical elements. She has been actively studying the origin and evolution of eastern Asian and eastern North American disjunct biogeographic pattern in flowering plants since her graduate days. She has made excellent progress toward understanding the general patterns and the timing of the disjunctions through work in her lab, Michael Donoghue’s group at YaleUniversity, and Jenny Xiang’s lab in North CarolinaStateUniversity. Recently Wen and Donoghue organized a symposium on “Biogeographic Dynamics in the Northern Hemisphere” at the 2005 International Botanical Congress in Vienna. Wen is especially interested in pursing further work on testing the morphological stasis hypothesis of eastern Asian – eastern North American disjuncts, and documenting the differentiation patterns of subtropical and tropical disjunct lineages in comparison with temperate relatives. Specifically, she is using Aralia, Dendropanax and Oreopanax-Sinopanax (Araliaceae), Altingiaceae (with postdoc Stefanie Ickert-Bond), Rhus, Pistacia and Toxicodendron (Anacardiaceae; with postdocs T. Yi and Z. Nie), and Prunus (Rosaceae; with Dan Potter and Joey Shaw) as models to examine in detail the evolution of morphological characters through time and space within a phylogenetic framework.
The third major area of research interest for Wen is the biogeography of Asia. Understanding the dynamic nature of biogeographic relationships throughout the Northern Hemisphere has been hindered by the lack of studies on intracontinental relationships. To date, the biogeography of most regions in Asia has not been well understood, especially from a modern phylogenetic perspective. Previous biogeographic work on Asia has focused mostly on West and Central Asia, or Southeast Asia and India, in the context of the Wallace’s line and the relationship of Southeast Asia and India to other biogeographic regions, often of Gondwanan origin such as Australia, New Guinea, Pacific islands, and Africa. The vast area encompassing eastern and South Asia and the Himalayas has been examined largely from a floristic perspective.
In 1944, Araliaceae were used by H.-L. Li to develop biogeographic hypotheses in China. Based on the distributions and presumed evolutionary relationships, Li recognized six biogeographic regions in China and its neighboring regions. Wen is developing and testing hypotheses on the biogeography of East and South Asia including the Himalayas using the phylogenetic evidence of three clades of Araliaceae: the Eleutherococcus – Macropanax – Metapanax complex, the Brassaiopsis – Trevesia group, and the Aralia – Panax complex.
The fourth category of research interests is the evolution of leaf morphology, using Araliaceae as a case study. Almost all types of leaf architecture can be found in Araliaceae. The leaves of Araliaceae vary from simple, to variously lobed or divided, to palmately and or pinnately compound. The variation in leaf morphology of Araliaceae varies with developmental stages, ecological habitats, and phylogenetic lineages. Many herbarium specimens have preserved the variations. Throughout her field studies since 1987, Wen has taken careful notes in the field on the variation of leaf morphology in Araliaceae. Wen is focusing on (1) carefully documenting the patterns of leaf variation genus by genus, (2) providing hypotheses on the adaptive significance of leaf variation in Araliaceae, and (3) providing a model of evolution and homologies for leaf architecture of the family based on evidence from phylogenetics, fossils, and developmental observations.
Wen’s fifth major area of research interest is the systematics and conservation of Asian medicinal plants. Wen first became interested in botany through the early teachings of her grandfather and uncle, both who are traditional medicinal doctors in her home village in China. Her work with ginsengs and close relatives has made her aware that many traditionally used medicines are still taxonomically poorly understood and many have become rare and endangered due to over-harvesting. In collaboration with colleagues in Asia, she would like to contribute to the careful documentation of Asian medicinal plants, with a conservation perspective, along with the development of a database with plant and drug images.
Finally, Wen has a strong interest in the conservation and biodiversity inventory of the flora of Asia, especially in poorly explored regions such as southeast Tibet, Myanmar, and Indochina (especially Cambodia and Laos). In 2002 she was a participant in the southern Gaoligongshan conservational rapid study jointly conducted by the FieldMuseum and collaborators in China.
Recently, Wen was awarded two major grants: a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation grant for biodiversity research and training in eastern Himalaya, with colleagues Greg Mueller and Rick Ree (both at the Field Museum); and a National Science Foundation systematic biology grant for phylogenetic, biogeographic and revisionary taxonomic studies in Prunus (Rosaceae), with colleagues Dan Potter (University of California, Davis) and Joey Shaw (University of Tennessee, Chattanooga).
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