NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2015

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This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2015, Research Using Biological Collections. The fellowship supports a research and training plan for the Fellow to take transformative approaches to grand challenges in biology that employ biological collections in highly innovative ways. The title of the research plan for this fellowship to Ryan Folk is "Niche biology in deep time: new methods for ancestral niche reconstruction applied to the Saxifragales." The host institution for this fellowship is the University of Florida, and the sponsoring scientists are Robert P. Guralnick, Douglas E. Soltis, and Pamela S. Soltis. An ecological niche is the role of a species in an ecological community, encompassing all of its interactions with other species and its physical environment. Ecological niche modeling (ENM) uses computer algorithms to model the ecological requirements of species and has emerged as an indispensible tool to predict their geographic distributions -- past, present, and future. ENM is perfectly suited to use the increasingly large and accessible amount of biological museum specimen data being generated across the world. These data and new modeling methods promise to provide answers to critical questions at the interface of ecology and evolutionary biology, such as the degree to which organisms can shift in ecological niche over time, with implications for their potential responses to present-day environmental change. The fellowship research is developing broadly applicable computational packages that utilize biological collections data and then using these tools to further integrate ENM with evolutionary history. Further, these computational tools are likely to see broader use by others to enable integrative research from the level of DNA to the structure of organisms. As a test case, the research focuses on the plant lineage Saxifragales, chosen for its particularly remarkable variation in ecological requirements, from northern tundra to desert, aquatic, and alpine habitats. This lineage is significant for containing familiar agricultural and garden plants such as currants, gooseberries, sweetgum, witch hazel, peonies, and coral bells as well as invasive weeds such as watermilfoil. Training goals for the Fellow include learning methods in biological informatics and ecological modeling and developing expertise in the natural history of saxifrages. The informatics training includes the use of scripting languages to parse and handle the large datasets now increasingly characteristic of biological collections research, thus preparing the Fellow for a research career using biological collections. Educational outreach includes both undergraduate biology courses and high school teaching.