Visiting Scientists

Ailene Ettinger, former Arnold Arboretum Putnam Fellow, focuses on predicting the response and sensitivity of plants to a changing climate. By examining diverse trees growing in a common environment like the Arboretum, she can identify functional traits that are important for success outside their historical conditions.

Anthony R. Brach has a strong interest in the plants of Asia including their taxonomy, identification, and ecology. As an editor Missouri Botanical Garden and of the Flora of China Project, he is interested in exploring the digitization and creation of web-based floras and interactive identification keys.

At the Arboretum, Dan Sullivan is evaluating a number of things to facilitate molecular studies of the Arboretum’s collections.  The major part of his work involves the establishment of an on-going collection of dried newly emerging leaves, which are an excellent year-round source of DNA, from the Arboretum’s highly curated accessions.

Dave Boufford has been leading exhibitions to Asia since 1977. Along with several colleagues, he is undertaking a survey of the plant and fungal diversity of the Hengduan Mountain region in southwestern China, one of the world’s hotspots of biodiversity. His expeditions in unexplored and underexplored regions complement collections made in the first half of the twentieth century by Joseph Rock, TT Yü, C. W. Wang, R. C. Ching, and others.

The research of David Des Marais focuses on how plants interact with the environment and the variation in these interactions between species. Understanding how plants adapt to the local environment can increase our ability to conserve plant populations.

The research program of Elizabeth (Toby) Kellogg is focused on the evolutionary biology of important cereal crops and their relatives in the grass family. The goal is to understand and predict how the floral structure of wild species affects climate resilience in wild and cultivated species.

Elizabeth Wolkovich is interested in how communities assemble and disassemble in light of global changes. The Wolkovich lab focuses on testing and understanding underlying mechanisms using both theoretical techniques and field experiments to study how current and future plant communities are shaped.

Erica Kirchhof is a Horticulture PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working with Dr. Al Kovaleski in the Plant Resilience Lab. She is interested in understanding how the progression of dormancy and cold hardiness in temperate woody perennials relates to the timing of budbreak in the spring. She is collecting data related to dormancy and bud cold hardiness in several different deciduous and evergreen species throughout the eastern United States, with the overall goal of improving phenology predictions in temperate regions. Erica was a 2021 DaRin Butz Research Intern.

Ian is interested in the molecular systems that allow plants to perceive environmental conditions and adjust their growth and development accordingly. Ian is a postdoc in the Des Marais group at MIT, where he studies the effects of carbon dioxide on grass development. Under increasing concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide, photosynthesis becomes more efficient, a phenomenon known as the CO2 fertilization effect. However, different species “spend” these “extra” resources differently, creating an exciting opportunity to examine the genetic basis of different patterns of carbon allocation.

Jacob Suissa is an evolutionary biologist focusing on Ferns and Lycophytes. He takes a broad scale macroevolutionary approach as well as a small scale physiological approach to answer interesting questions about fern evolution.

Building on her work as a Putnam fellow, Jessica Savage will examine a diverse set of species in the Arboretum’s living collections to see how the anatomical diversity of phloem, the part of the vascular system responsible for sugar transport, may impact patterns of vegetative and reproductive growth.

• Savage JA, Kiecker T, McMann N, Park D, Rothendler M, Mosher K. 2022. Leaf out time correlates with wood anatomy across large geographic scales and within local communities. New Phytologist 235: 953-64. Abstract

 

As Putnam Fellow, Jianhua Li studied the phylogenetic relationships of witch hazels (Hamamelis) and studied the classification of tree lilacs (Syringa) with Arboretum propagator Jack Alexander. After his fellowship, Jianhua served a senior research scientist at the Arboretum until 2009. With his Sargent Award, Jianhua will return to the Arboretum for his sabbatical focusing on the reconstruction of the early tree of life of Acer. The evolutionary relationships of this important and diverse tree genus has, thus far, remained largely unresolved hindering our understanding of the natural history of maples.

The research of Lorna Gibson is focused on the mechanics of materials with a cellular structure such as engineering honeycombs and foams, natural materials such as wood, leaves and bamboo and medical materials such as trabecular bone and tissue engineering scaffolds.

Lucy Hutyra focuses on understanding the carbon cycle in an urban environment with research sites across Boston including the Arnold Arboretum. Lucy and Pam Templer collaborate with the Arnold Arboretum to set-up, operate, and analyze the data gathered from the Arboretum’s National Atmospheric Deposition Program (NADP site – MA98) at Weld Hill.

Megan Wilcots was the first Global Change Fellow from the Arnold Arboretum, a position she held jointly with the HUCE as an Environmental Fellow. As a Visiting Scholar, Megan works with Professor Ben Taylor to study how Arctic heatwaves alter nitrogen fixation and carbon uptake.

Overwintering of leaf buds is a common strategy thought to allow plants to adapt to periodically stressful environments. Morgan Moeglein developed a comparative framework for understanding fundamental questions of the timing and mechanisms of leaf preformation in buds, its contribution to seasonal growth, and the conservation of these strategies using closely related species in the Arboretum’s living collections. Morgan is an assistant professor at Norwich University and a Visiting Scholar of the Arnold Arboretum.

The work of Pamela Templer involves examining the effects of climate change and urbanization on forest ecosystems including numerous sites at the Arboretum. In addition, Pam and Lucy Hutyra collaborate with the Arnold Arboretum to set-up, operate, and analyze the data gathered from the Arboretum’s National Atmospheric Deposition Program (NADP site – MA98) at Weld Hill.

Sonia Sultan studies individual plasticity–how developing plants adjust their phenotypes and those of their offspring in alternative environmental conditions, often in adaptive ways. Through greenhouse and growth chamber experiments using local Polygonum genotypes as a naturally evolved model system, her group characterizes the breadth of phenotypic response to ecologically realistic environmental challenges such as drought stress and shade, including the epigenetically mediated transgenerational effects of these stresses on offspring phenotypes.