Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology
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DEPARTMENT OF EVOLUTION, ECOLOGY, AND ORGANISMAL BIOLOGY STRATEGIC PLAN AND INVESTMENT IMPACT ANALYSIS THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY DECEMBER 2008 Table of Contents Overview of Department and Strategic Plan 1 Overview of Hiring Plan 2 Hires within the Evolutionary Biology Core 2 Hires within the Ecology Core 3 Hires bridging Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Cores 4 Special Initiative to Enhance Graduate Education 4 Proposed Hiring Sequence and Projected Setup and Space Needs 4 Impact of Investment on Performance Metrics and Graduate Program Ranking 5 Tables 1 – 5 6 Faculty Biographical Sketches 11 Appendix A (Program Review: 22-23 May 2006) 68 i EEOB STRATEGIC PLAN 2008 OVERVIEW OF DEPARTMENT AND STRATEGIC PLAN Department Vision: “The Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology has a rich tradition of blending basic and applied research. We promote scientific discovery and scientific literacy through research, teaching, and public outreach. We strive for leadership in our scholarly disciplines and excellence in the classroom. To those ends, our service to the University and the community is built on the strength of a diverse, collegial workplace and the free flow of ideas”. The research and graduate training conducted by EEOB faculty takes place nowhere else on the Ohio State University campus and is integral to our institutional position as a leader in the environmental and life sciences. Our overarching strategic vision is to leverage our newly increased size and strength with a series of high-impact hires and a post-doctoral Fellowship program, enabling us to move into the top third of our benchmark departmental peers and the top 15% of ecology and evolutionary biology graduate programs nationally. Our proposed hires will build on the department’s core research strengths, advance our faculty and graduate diversity goals, and improve our competitive position for recruiting graduate students relative to our benchmark peer departments. The distribution of hires within our core areas of strength takes into consideration the dynamics of emerging fields (what is ‘hot’), near-term retirements (maintaining critical mass), and interdisciplinary potential (funding options and graduate recruitment). Implementing our plan will position EEOB and its graduate program for rapid advancement in national reputation and for continued leadership in biological sciences at Ohio State. Currently, EEOB has 23 tenured or tenure track faculty, including 5 assistant, 10 associate, and 8 full professors (Table 1). An additional 8 faculty from the Entomology Department will join EEOB in 2009 (3 associate and 5 full professors). For the purposes of this strategic plan, the EEOB faculty consists of the 31 individuals listed in Table 1. Of these 31 faculty, 5 have partial appointments in other departments or with the central administration. Eleven additional members of the department hold appointments at one of our four regional campuses (Table 2) but are not included in our impact analysis due to their larger teaching and service duties. We are involved in an ongoing search with the Department of Mathematics for a biological mathematician (20% FTE in EEOB) and are in negotiations for a senior hire in Biogeochemistry as part of a faculty retention package with the School of Earth Sciences. We occupy research and office space in three buildings. Aronoff Laboratory (AL), constructed in 2002 on the central campus, houses our main administrative offices and the majority (18) of our faculty laboratories. This high quality space, in close proximity to OSU’s Mathematical Biosciences Institute, is key to the continued success of our core groups who do lab-based research in evolutionary biology and plant and insect ecology, and to recruitment and retention of outstanding faculty and graduate students. The Museum of Biological Diversity (MBD), located on West campus, houses 8 faculty laboratories and our extensive holdings of plant and animal specimens. The MBD will be home to the Center for Biodiversity Research and Analysis (CEBRA), a proposed new college center. The Research Center (RC), also on West campus, accommodates the specialized needs of the Aquatic Ecology Laboratory, including the experimental growth facilities, computer and wet laboratories, and research watercraft required by this very active core group. We will be able to house new faculty hires through the efficient allocation of laboratory space within our existing footprint in each building. With additional faculty from Entomology, EEOB will be the largest department within the historic College of Biological Sciences and near the mean size of our benchmark peer departments (Tables 3 & 4). Recent central investment in EEOB has been through funding of four new hires since 2005, each with very competitive set-up packages, with a fifth search underway. Three of these hires are inter- departmental joint positions linked to EEOB’s leading role in the Targeted Investment in Excellence initiative in Mathematical Biosciences. Institutional commitments to the Biological Sciences portion of 1 EEOB STRATEGIC PLAN 2008 this initiative will provide $2.8 million over the next five years to support faculty hires in quantitative biology and will build on our growing reputation in this field in collaboration with OSU’s Mathematical Biosciences Institute. EEOB also is well known for its success recruiting under-represented groups to its faculty and graduate student population. We are committed to advancing departmental diversity and have built this into our strategic plans. Pre-merger with Entomology, we had an average sized doctoral program graduating a similar number of PhDs per year as our NRC-listed peer graduate programs (Table 5, Group B). However, our PhD admission yield was lower (although recently improving), time to degree slightly longer, and incoming student GRE scores no better than our peer median. We have taken several steps recently to intensify our recruitment efforts and to facilitate the timely and productive progress of our students. We now bring all of our top applicants to Columbus for an organized recruitment event in early February, we have altered the timing and format of the PhD qualifying exam so that students can focus on research by their second year, the Graduate Studies Committee has instituted detailed annual progress reviews of all students, and collaboratively with the EEOB graduate student organization we have re-organized our two quarter graduate orientation course, which now covers an array of topics to benefit students in both professional and personal ways. These changes should increase the quality of students we recruit and enhance their productivity while they are in our program. In 2006, EEOB underwent a comprehensive program review as mandated by the Office of Academic Affairs. Lacking a national ranking of EEOB-type departments at the time, we established a set of 12 benchmark departments against which our performance could be compared (Table 3, Group A). As part of the program review, we conducted external and internal opinion surveys, both of which placed us in the middle third of this group of departments. An outside panel also was convened to assess the review, interview faculty, students, and staff, and make recommendations to the Dean and Provost. Their report (Appendix A) contained analyses of many specific areas of strength and weakness, and included the following major recommendations: explore collaborations, formal or informal, with Entomology; add 1 or 2 “super stars” to the faculty; explore ideas to pursue large training grants and other collaborative grants; improve graduate student recruitment efforts; and guarantee funding of incoming graduate students in their offer letters. OVERVIEW OF HIRING PLAN Much of the research and graduate training in EEOB takes place in two broad areas of biological inquiry, ecology and evolutionary biology, but with each group having significant linkages to the study of processes operating at the organismal level (Table 1). Additionally, science education is an area of active scholarship by a group of three senior faculty. Within the ecology and evolution cores, the distribution of faculty by rank and performance metrics are fairly evenly matched, but with somewhat more faculty (42% vs 29%) working in evolutionary biology. The concentration of faculty in ecology and evolution mirrors that our of benchmark peers, as does the presence of an important third component focusing on organismal biology (Table 4). Our strategic hiring plans over the next four years are intended to move us into the top third of our benchmark peers. Hires within the Evolutionary Biology Core The Evolutionary Biology faculty in EEOB elucidate patterns of physiological, genetic, and morphological diversity, and seek to understand these patterns in an evolutionary framework. We will augment these strengths by hiring colleagues who study the processes that generate this diversity, and who develop new methods for analyzing and organizing the data used to reveal both pattern and process. The Evolutionary Biology group is the focus of two college-wide initiatives that consolidate and expand our research strengths. The Mathematical Biosciences initiative recognizes our strength in developing and 2 EEOB STRATEGIC PLAN 2008 interpreting models of evolutionary change and has supported a series of hires in this area. The CEBRA proposal (submitted separately) highlights and provides a point of focus for the study of systematic biology within the University.