VOL. 35 ISSUE 2 | THE SCIENTIST 9Contributors
FEBRUARY 2021PATRICK CAMPBELL; VERONICA SPARKS; CONOR GOULDING; MOTE MARINE LABORATORY; CONOR GOULDING
Because both of her parents were biologists,Angela E. Boag was essentially “raised
on David Attenborough,” she says. And she consequently developed a love of nature
and ecosystems. At Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, Boag earned a bachelor’s
degree in biology in 2010, and followed that up with a master’s degree in forestry from
the University of British Columbia and a doctorate in environmental studies from
the University of Colorado Boulder, where she researched climate change effects
on forests in and around the US Rocky Mountains. After graduating, she became a
policy advisor for climate change, forest management, and energy at the Colorado
Department of Natural Resources.
Nathalie Isabelle Chardon has also always been fascinated with biology, but
it wasn’t until she attended field classes while studying abroad in Chile during her
junior year at the University of California, Berkeley, that she began to focus on ecology.
She became curious about what drives species’ distributional patterns and how climate
change influences their performance and distribution. She finished her bachelor’s degree
in integrative biology in 2010 and worked for the United States Forest Service for a few
years before starting a doctoral program in environmental studies at the University
of Colorado Boulder, where she studied the consequences of human disturbance on
alpine plant distributions. After graduating in 2018, Chardon started a postdoc at the
WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research in Switzerland.
Boag and Chardon met and became friends during their doctoral studies at
the University of Colorado Boulder, where they realized that something important
provided by their jobs outside of academia was missing from their roles as graduate
student researchers: clear professional expectations. “Graduate students have really
good access to resources for almost everything you can imagine, but there’s little
proactive management” of students by their mentors, says Chardon. On page 14,
Boag and Chardon discuss ways to improve graduate student/advisor relationships.Michael P. Crosby grew up “at the water’s edge” in Key West, Florida. “I remember
my father telling me about how beautiful those coral reefs were before I could
even really swim,” he says. Imbued with this love of the ocean, Crosby pursued
a doctorate in marine-estuarine environmental science from the University of
Maryland and launched a career in marine and coastal ecology. He held several
faculty positions before serving as vice chancellor for research at the University
of Hawai‘i at Hilo and as associate vice president for research and economic
development at George Mason University in Virginia. In 2013, he became the
president and CEO of Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium, an independent and
nonprofit research institution.
Crosby selected Erinn Muller as Mote’s first postdoc in 2012, and she began her
studies of coral health and disease dynamics before becoming a senior scientist and
program manager at the laboratory. In 2018, she helped mentor Hanna R. Koch,
who had joined Mote as a visiting researcher. Koch is now Mote’s newest postdoctoral
fellow and studies sexual reproduction in corals.
Together, Crosby, Muller, and Koch have been testing new strategies to restore
widespread damage to coral reefs caused by climate change and environmental
pollutants. “The message that we continually hear... is a very real one of alarm
with respect to climate change and its devastating impacts on our oceans and coral
reefs,” says Crosby. On page 24, the three researchers outline the urgency of coral reef
loss and describe their research efforts, which Crosby says he thinks will bring hope to
the scientific community.Contributors