LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR

One of the remarkable things about traveling is finding the unexpected, the moments that overturn our preconceptions. The surfaces of things often look only a little different from our expectations. But when we take the time to dig deeper, a new world can open up, of hidden histories of ecology, people, arts, and languages. Stranger things are often closer than we thought, and it is a special skill of the faculty in the School of Biological Sciences to discover those strange things and share the surprises with our students.

Our new faculty exemplify the surprises that lie behind the surface of living things.

When Nick Vierra looks within neurons, he finds that they do indeed talk to each other with the signals that make it possible to read this letter. But that signaling occurs through cellular structures that nobody anticipated. When Luiza Aparecido notices an urban tree on a hot day, she sees beyond the wilted leaves to the internal struggle to stay alive in this novel environment. Or when Eleinis Ávila-Lovera looks at the green stems of plants, she doesn't just say "everyone knows that plants are green." She considers what those stems are doing.

At their best, these journeys take us outside the world of science into important, and surprising, applications. Would one expect that studying how plants use water would have allowed Jim Ehleringer to protect the financial interests of growers of the legendary Hawaiian Kona coffee? Or that Talia Backman, a graduate student in Talia Karasov’s lab, would discover that bacteria have hijacked proteins from the viruses that attack them to attack other bacteria? Or that ecologist Nalini Nadkarni's obsession with trees would lead her to climb into the world of impact investing through a new role at our Sorenson Impact Center?

One never knows what is lurking behind the surface of a new place, a corner of biology, and even one's own life. And that is precisely what education is about. Discovery happens every time we open our minds, whether in the classroom, the field or in the lab, and when the boundary between research and instruction breaks down. Preconceptions are necessary to see anything and the best scientists and students are those who use preconceptions to open themselves to surprise rather than confirming what they expect.

So it is when you go somewhere, flip over a rock, talk to a new person, or take that wrong turn. Or maybe just open up this issue of Our DNA.

Sincerely,

Director Fred Adler