03.2020 | THE SCIENTIST 9Contributors
MARCH 2020KRISTEN HANNING; CATHERINE DELPHIA; M. TIMOTHY RABANUS-WALLACE
Growing up in Belgium, tree-ring scientistValerie Trouet caught her first glimpse of science watching
her father, a cancer researcher who stored caged mice in the family’s basement. Although Trouet’s own
research ultimately took her in a different direction—on an epic search for the information stored in
trees—she was inspired by her father’s passion for “doing something worthwhile in this world.” A trip to
Tanzania for her master’s thesis introduced Trouet to the study of tree rings. She marveled at the beauty
of her wood samples, and when she traveled to California’s Sierra Nevada mountains to study forest fires,
she truly grasped the majesty of the wilderness that she was trying to understand and preserve.
As an associate professor in the University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, Trouet has
used tree-ring data to reconstruct the jet stream, revealing more frequent weather extremes in recent
years than in 1960. Another of Trouet’s studies analyzed 800 years of tree-ring data to explore how des-
erts expand and contract in response to volcanic eruptions and other drivers. “We’re in a very exciting
time for science,” she says, “because one, we have great data sets, two, we have a lot of computing power,
three, we’re building on centuries of science. I feel like it’s finally all coming together.” Read an essay by
Trouet about her new book, Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings, on page 59.Catherine Delphia realized she has been good at drawing from a young age, and she’s liked nature for as
long as she can remember. In an AP biology class in high school in rural western Massachusetts, as she
was sketching the digestive tract of a fish she was dissecting, a classmate mentioned to her that perhaps
she should consider medical illustration. “After doing some preliminary investigation, it really appealed
to me,” Delphia says. In 2003, she completed her undergrad at Colorado State University, where she
studied graphic design and drawing, with minors in anatomy and zoology, and added a master’s degree
in medical illustration from Johns Hopkins University three years later. Delphia worked for a couple
of years at a fledgling publishing company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, collaborating with a team of
Harvard biologists led by E.O. Wilson on a biology textbook, and then decided to “take the plunge” and
start her own company, she says. She moved back to The Berkshires where she’d grown up and launched
Medical Illustration Studios.
Yo u can find her art in science journals, in patient education materials at Boston Children’s Hospital,
and even in the courtroom, where her depictions of plaintiffs’ injuries are sometimes put on display dur-
ing legal proceedings. Delphia’s illustrations have also graced the pages of The Scientist since 2010. On
page 40 of this issue, her work depicts how cellular senescence plays a role in aging and disease.Evolutionary biologist and agricultural geneticist M. Timothy Rabanus-Wallacebecame interested
in plant genetics while attending lectures at the University of Adelaide in Australia, where he received
bachelor’s degrees in philosophy and evolutionary biology before earning a PhD in biology in 2017.
“Plant researchers tend to have great stories to tell,” he says, because “they’re looking at organisms that
don’t have evolutionary constraints like animals do.” For example, while many animals have a fixed body
plan, plants can grow in a huge variety of forms, which they exploit to solve the challenges of life with
subtle and ingenious solutions, he explains.
Rabanus-Wallace didn’t focus entirely on plants in grad school—he mainly studied the ecology
of ancient mammals—but the work he did has a connection to the crops he now researches as a staff
scientist at the Leibniz Institute for Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) in Gatersleben,
Germany. “They evolved in the same environment.... The mammoths and horses were actually
eating the ancestors of these crop plants,” he says. Now, he’s playing a leading role in an international
consortium dedicated to assembling the vast and complex genome of modern rye, an effort he hopes
will increase ry e’s use as a food crop in harsh environments. On page 12, read more about his thoughts
on overcoming “plant blindness,” the tendency for people, including researchers, to ignore plants in
favor of charismatic animals.