The Plant Press

New faces

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 4, October 2021.

José Anibal Medina Vega is a postdoctoral fellow with ForestGEO and NGEE–Tropics working to develop a pantropical analysis of nutrient controls and their impact on tropical tree recruitment, growth, and mortality. He began his fellowship in August 2021. His office is located in the Department of Botany at the National Museum of Natural History. Medina Vega received his B.S. at Pan-American School of Agriculture, Zamorano in Honduras and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Forest and Nature Conservation at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. Prior to coming to ForestGEO, he had a postdoctoral fellowship in Stefan Schnitzer’s lab at Marquette University in Wisconsin. Medina Vega collected the data for his doctoral dissertation using canopy cranes of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama from 2015 to 2017.

His current fellowship is to develop a pantropical analysis of nutrient controls on lowland tropical forest structure and functional composition. This analysis will be synthesized into a suite of model testbed sites used to evaluate and benchmark model nutrient cycle representations. Medina Vega will use long-term ForestGEO data coupled with recent detailed soil surveys. For his future research, Medina Vega would like to advance the current knowledge of the mechanisms that regulate the dynamics of natural ecosystems, particularly in the tropical forest biome, by incorporating the study of largely ignored life forms, such as lianas and/or palms, to the already more advanced tree research. He aims to investigate their associations and interactions within each other and with the biome. His hope is that his work can provide a more complete understanding of the dynamics of tropical forest systems.

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David Wickell is conducting a 10-week graduate student fellowship in the Department of Botany during the fall of 2021. He is working with Liz Zimmer using genomic methods to elucidate the evolutionary history of allopolyploid speciation in the genus Isoetes. During his time at the Smithsonian Wickell hopes to use Isoetes as a window into how polyploid lineages form and persist within the range of their well-established diploid parents. In addition to his research into polyploidy, Wickell studies the convergent evolution of CAM photosynthesis in Isoetes as part of his doctoral research in Fay-Wei Li’s laboratory at Cornell University. Prior to starting his PhD, he studied asexual biogeography of apomictic ferns with James Beck at Wichita State University where he received his Master’s degree in Biology. Wickell’s current research interests include fern and lycophyte phylogenetics and niche evolution in nascent polyploids.

A virtual summer experience for natural history interns

From Plant Press, Vol. 24, No. 4, October 2021.

Natural History Research Experiences (NHRE) was a Research Experience for Undergraduates site at the National Museum of Natural History sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Each summer (2010-2021) NHRE welcomed approximately15-18 exceptional undergraduate students from around the United States to the museum for a 10-week-long research project guided by an NMNH scientist. NMNH curators Liz Cottrell (Mineral Sciences) and Gene Hunt (Paleobiology) co-Directed NHRE.

Isabella Schrader

This year, NHRE intern Isabella Schrader worked with Rebecca Dikow, Mike Trizna, and Alex White (Smithsonian’s Office of the Chief Information Officer), Paul Frandsen and Ashlyn Powell (Brigham Young University), as well as Botany’s Eric Schuettpelz, on a project called, “Using machine learning tools to quantify mercuric chloride staining across digitized herbarium specimens.” The goal of the project was to update a machine learning model that identifies mercuric chloride staining on digitized herbarium sheets and apply it to all digitized species housed at the U.S. National Herbarium.

Schrader presented her results at a NHRE virtual research symposium held for Smithsonian staff on August 5, 2021. All 14 NHRE interns presented their e-posters using the Gather.Town app, a platform that allows participants to move and interact freely within a virtual space using an avatar. The symposium was well-attended by NMNH staff, associates, and volunteers.

New faces

From Plant Press, Vol. 23, No. 2, April 2020.

Richie Hodel started as a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow in the Botany Department in January 2020. Hodel is working with Jun Wen and Liz Zimmer to use phylogenomic approaches and collections-based deep learning technologies to resolve phylogeny, assess ancient polyploidy, and infer the biogeographic history of Prunus (Rosaceae). Hodel studied the comparative phylogeography of Neotropical mangroves (genera Avicennia, Laguncularia, Rhizophora) for his doctoral work at the University of Florida with Doug and Pam Soltis, completed in 2017. He recently finished his first postdoctoral appointment at the University of Michigan with Lacey Knowles and Stephen Smith studying the comparative phylogeography of montane sedges (genus Carex), and working on phylogenomic methods development. His research interests include the comparative phylogeography of island taxa, biogeography and niche evolution, and tropical-to-temperate transitions.

New Faces

From Plant Press, Vol. 22, No. 4, October 2019.

Daniel Zuleta is a postdoctoral fellow working on tropical forest mortality with ForestGEO and Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments–Tropics (NGEE–Tropics). His research has focused on understanding the spatial variation in drought-induced tree mortality and biomass dynamics, as well as assessing the interactions between the species’ drought tolerances and their spatial distributions in Amazon forests. As a postdoctoral fellow, Zuleta aims to understand the mechanisms driving tropical forest mortality in order to develop mortality models that can be included in the Functionally Assembled Terrestrial Ecosystem Simulator (FATES) model and improve predictions of forest response to environmental changes. He will use long-term forest dynamics data from ForestGEO sites along with annual mortality censuses established by Gabriel Arellano to explore tree death modes and implications on stand carbon dynamics. He will additionally collect data on plant stress attributes and the response of trees to extreme climatic events to infer the physiological mechanisms of tree death. Zuleta is based at the ForestGEO headquarters at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.

New Faces

From Plant Press, Vol. 22, No. 3, July 2019.

Caly McCarthy joined ForestGEO as Administrative Assistant in April 2019 and is based at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. McCarthy combines her interest in plants with her proclivity for details in this position. Prior to this role, McCarthy worked at Turtle Tree Biodynamic Seed Initiative and lived as a co-worker at Camphill Village, an agricultural community of diverse ages, origins, and developmental abilities in Copake, New York. McCarthy holds a Bachelor of Arts in both history and environmental studies from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

This summer, Jun Wen and Liz Zimmer are co-mentoring Regina Fairbanks, a Natural History Research Experiences (NHRE) student intern who will be a junior at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall. Fairbanks is working on phylogenomics of the ginseng genus, Panax. Kathryn Picard and Eric Schuettpelz are co-mentoring Zahra Domin, an NHRE intern who will be a senior at Dominican University this fall. Additionally, they are co-mentoring Smithsonian interns Noah Olson and Blake Fauskee, both recent graduates of the University of Minnesota Duluth. All three interns are investigating the incidence of asexuality (in the form of apomixis) within ferns and assessing the role apomixis plays in shaping fern biogeographical patterns.

New Faces

From Plant Press, Vol. 22, No. 2, April 2019.

Joel Nitta

Joel Nitta joined the Department of Botany as a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow in January 2019. Nitta is working with Eric Schuettpelz and Warren Wagner to investigate the biogeography of pteridophytes (ferns and lycophytes) in the Pacific, with a focus on Polynesia. This project expands on Nitta's Ph.D. research at Harvard University where he examined community assembly of ferns on the islands of Tahiti and Moorea, French Polynesia. Nitta recently completed his first postdoctoral fellowship as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellow with Atsushi Ebihara at the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tsukuba, Japan, where he developed next-generation DNA sequencing methods to better understand the evolution of fern species complexes. Nitta is interested in pteridophyte systematics, ecology, and evolution, and is enthusiastic about the practice of reproducible data analysis with open-source code.

New Faces

From Plant Press, Vol. 22, No. 1, January 2019.

Kathryn Picard joined the Department of Botany as a postdoctoral fellow in October 2018. Working under the supervision of Eric Schuettpelz, she is studying the incidence and evolutionary consequences of apomixis in the diverse fern order Polypodiales. Picard earned her Master’s degree at the University of Alabama where she modeled the early evolution of plant-fungal symbioses using a chytrid-alga system. For her doctoral research at Duke University, Picard explored the phylogenetic diversity of marine fungi and developed high-throughput molecular tools for generating reference sequence data from uncultured marine taxa. Her research interests include systematics of the flagellated fungi, the evolution of plant-fungal mutualisms, and developing genetic resources for “dark taxa”.

New Faces

From Plant Press, Vol. 21, No. 4, October 2018.

Alex White

Alex White is a post-doctoral fellow with a joint appointment in the Department of Botany at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) and the Data Science Lab in the Smithsonian Office of Information. White is working with Laurence Dorr and Eric Schuettpelz at NMNH and Rebecca Dikow in the Data Science Lab on developing machine learning models for evaluating global scale patterns of trait diversity in digitized herbarium collections. White recently completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago where he studied the ecological and evolutionary drivers of Himalayan bird diversity gradients with a particular focus on biogeography. His research broadly concerns developing computational methods for combining local community data with macroscale data to evaluate contemporary and historical limits on diversity.

New Faces

From Plant Press, Vol. 21, No. 3, July 2018.

Based in Lagos, Nigeria, Temitayo Ogunbiyi is a visual artist who creates work that considers and constructs contemporary channels of communication. She is currently working on a series that fuses hairstyles with botanical forms. This will be honed and developed further during her Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. Working with Gary Krupnick and John Kress, her research in the Department of Botany at the National Museum of Natural History will focus on medicinal plant species that thrive in the tropics. Her findings will inform forthcoming works on paper and playground sculptures. She is also conducting research at the National Museum of African Art, the National Museum of American History, and the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum. Ogunbiyi’s work has been shown at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, the Center for Contemporary Art Lagos (Nigeria), Tiwani Contemporary Gallery (London), Stephen Friedman Gallery (London), the Perm Museum of Contemporary Art (Perm, Russia), and Berlin Art Projects (Berlin). She recently took part in Strange Attractors, an artist book that was produced as part of the 10^th Berlin Biennale. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Princeton University in Art History, Visual Art, and African-American Studies and an M.A. in Curatorial Studies and Critical Art Theory from Columbia University.

Retiring from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service in Beltsville, Maryland after more than 30 years, John H. Wiersema will be continuing his taxonomic and nomenclatural work at the National Museum of Natural History as a Research Associate in the Department of Botany, a position he has held since 2014. Previously he was a taxonomist for the USDA’s national germplasm system’s GRIN database. This position provided the opportunity to develop GRIN Taxonomy into an extensive and exhaustive taxonomic resource on economic plants important to global agriculture. Through this work Wiersema gained global standing as a specialist in plant nomenclature, and now has direct editorial involvement with both the botanical and cultivated plant codes of international nomenclature and the international journal Taxon. Wiersema is also well known as a specialist on the taxonomy of the water-lily family, especially the genus Nymphaea, is responsible for the discovery and description of several new species, and has participated in over 30 scientific publications on the group. He expects to pursue both of these interests here in the Botany Department.

New Faces

From Plant Press, Vol. 21, No. 2, April 2018.

Marcos A. Caraballo-Ortiz joined the Smithsonian Botany Department in January as a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow under the supervision of Jun Wen and Pedro Acevedo. His research is focused on exploring the phylogenetic relationships and organelle structure of loranthaceous mistletoes in the Neotropic. Caraballo-Ortiz obtained his Master’s degree at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras on pollination ecology, and his doctoral degree at The Pennsylvania State University on the taxonomy, phylotranscriptomics, and ecology of Caribbean mistletoes. His research also includes taxonomy, botanical explorations, natural history, propagation, and ecology of Neotropical plants, especially from the Caribbean Islands.

This past Fall and Winter, Caroline Kittle worked as a data intern with the administrative offices of ForestGEO at the Natural History Museum. She primarily collected life history information for species present in two of the network’s 65 forest research plots, which together represent every forest type worldwide. Her work contributed to the refinement of new ForestGEO website. Kittle is continuing her journey with ForestGEO as a member of the 2018 re-census crew for the plot at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Virginia.