Peter Buck Fellowship Program 2016 - 2017 Progress Report Executive Summary Thrilling. Enlightening. Brimming. Galvanizing. Life-Changing. These are just a few of the words awardees chose to best describe their Peter Buck Fellowships at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). For the 86 talented men and women selected for the program since 2011, and the countless more to come, there are as many ways to articulate the profound impact of this unique scholarly experience. The Peter Buck Fellowship Program embodies the Museum’s mission and is among its greatest assets. Leveraging our vast collections, cutting-edge technologies, and dynamic exhibitions and educational outreach, its participants join the ranks of world-renowned Smithsonian scientists in advancing research that increases our knowledge of the natural and cultural worlds. Buck Fellows travel across time and space. They revisit moments in history, like the dawn of the Age of Reptiles, the dramatic Cambrian Explosion, and the 19th century Euro- American voyages of the South Pacific. They traverse the remote regions of Canada’s northwest, the depths of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, and the “salamander hotspot of the world,” the Appalachian Mountain Range. Whether in the lab or in the field, their contributions to science are ambitious, relevant, critical, and, thanks to the generosity of Dr. Peter Buck, possible. This flourishing program has awarded a total of 89 pre- and postdoctoral fellowships over the past seven years. As of August 2017, there are 33 Fellows currently or soon-to-be engaged in active research at the Museum, with an additional 53 alumni continuing their science careers at organizations and institutions around the world. The Class of 2017 includes 13 postdoctoral students who, like members of all previous classes, represent a wide range of research topics. Their bold investigations are tackling some of science’s biggest mysteries and challenges. What do the glacial phases of the Middle Pennsylvanian-Early Permian tell us about the effects of climate change on plant- insect interactions? How can the plight of flightless island birds help us better understand how and why organism distributions change over time? How might deep-sea crustaceans inform the underlying principles of brain design and evolution? The answers they uncover will help inform humankind’s decisions across industries—from agriculture to aviation, medicine to manufacturing—and hold the key to Earth’s future. The following report features each Buck Fellow currently in-residence or soon to arrive at the Museum. Their profiles reveal not only the diverse professional training, accomplishments, and goals of these scholars, but the scope of their engagement across Museum departments and within the larger scientific community. 2016 - 2017 Progress Report / 1 A bibliography listed at the end of the report includes Buck Fellows’ publications from September 2016 to July 2017. Since our last report, Fellows have published 161 new scholarly papers, 13 of which were co-authored by more than one Buck Fellow. As of July 2017, Buck Fellows have made a total of 373 individual contributions to scientific publications as authors or co-authors. Many of these publications attract significant media attention as tracked by Altmetric Attention Scores, a high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention received. Enclosed with this report are two Smithsonian press releases on recent studies of notable acclaim, featuring Buck Fellows Graham Slater and Fredrick Larabee’s recent discoveries related to baleen whale evolution and trap-jaw ant anatomy, respectively. Advancing Strategic Priorities Deep Time and Global Genomes Initiative Buck Fellows While all Buck Fellows make significant contributions to different areas of the Museum’s work, the program has made six awards to projects that specifically align with the goals and objectives of our major Deep Time and Global Genome Initiatives. These opportunities enrich the Peter Buck Fellowship experience by incorporating a dual emphasis on research and educational outreach, while also enabling the Museum to further leverage the program in support of its strategic priorities. Of these six Fellows, Antoine Bercovici is the first to complete his tenure. While in residence, he used pollen to contribute innovative perspectives on mass extinctions at the end-Permian and end-Cretaceous Periods. He wrote several pieces for the Museum’s FossiLab blog, developed videos, and participated in live outreach during the summer field season in association with Science Communicator and LiveScience Correspondent John Hankla of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He also prototyped an interactive activity for Q?rius about how fossil pollen can be used to reconstruct extinct landscapes. In addition to this report’s profiles on the rest of the Deep Time and GGI Buck Fellows, a more comprehensive write-up summarizing Bercovici’s activities is enclosed. 2016 - 2017 Progress Report / 2 Expanding Alumni Impact As its alumni base grows each year, the achievements of this group serve as an increasingly important measure of the success and impact of the Peter Buck Fellowship Program. Upon completing their tenures at the Museum, Fellows go on to secure additional fellowships, research opportunities, and permanent positions within academia, museums, government, and other scientific institutions. Of 53 alumni asked to share professional updates, 21 are working within higher education at universities both in the United States and abroad. Of these, several have secured tenure-track positions. Thirteen alumni are working at natural history museums and other scientific institutions, including the Denver Museum, Field Museum, and the California Academy of Sciences. Others retain their affiliation with the Smithsonian as research associates while planning the next phase of their careers. Below are highlights on a just a few individuals, followed by a more comprehensive listing of the group’s current job titles and accomplishments as of August 2017. - Nawa Sugiyama (2014 Buck Fellow) is a rising star in archaeology who, after her Buck Fellowship, received a tenure-track assistant professor position at George Mason University. She is currently co-directing a major archaeological research project at Teotihuacan, Mexico, looking at animal sacrifice and humans keeping wildlife in captivity prehistorically. - Ning Zhang (2013 Buck Fellow) is an ORISE Fellow at the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition in College Park, Maryland. Her project, “Development of a Reference Standard Library of Chloroplast Genome Sequences, GenomeTrakrCP,” involves work on a database for rapid species identification of plants in foods and dietary supplements. Target species include foods and spices, botanical dietary supplements, known toxin producers like Japanese star anise, food allergens, and known contaminants and species closely related to any of the above. Now having collected 350 individuals and assembled 60 complete chloroplast genomes, these data were deposited in the GenBank and are open to public. Since beginning this job in October 2015, she has published two papers. - Tyler Lyson (2012 Buck Fellow) is Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Denver Museum of Science and Nature. Since leaving NMNH, he has published two papers that received considerable media attention, one on the origin of the unique breathing mechanism of turtles and a second on evidence that the early stages in the origin of the turtle shell were adaptions to a burrowing lifestyle. 2016 - 2017 Progress Report / 3 - Graham Slater (2012 Buck Fellow) is Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago, one of the most prestigious departments for evolutionary paleontology. His recent press coverage about a paper he co-authored with NMNH’s Nick Pyenson in 2017, is enclosed with this report. - Fred Davis (2012 Buck Fellow) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at University of Minnesota Duluth. His proudest accomplishment since arriving at UMD is securing his first NSF grant for a project on which he is the sole Principal Investigator. The project is an experimental investigation of the chemical behavior of transition metals during magma formation in Earth's interior that will improve our understanding of how recycling of tectonic plates into Earth's interior has influenced Earth's chemical evolution. - Former Buck Fellows Bert Van Bocxlaer (2011) and Margaret Anne Hinkle (2015) provided more personalized input, captured here in their own words: After my Peter Buck Fellowship, I was awarded a two-year Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship in Germany (with Prof. Christian Albrecht, Justus Liebig University Giessen and Dr. Thomas von Rintelen, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin), and a three-year postdoctoral fellowship of the Flanders Research Foundation (with Prof. Dirk Verschuren, Ghent University). I ended the latter fellowship early because I was hired as a full-time researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in January 2017. In this capacity, and having recently been accepted for tenure, I am currently working at UMR 8198 Evolution, Ecology, Paleontology of the CNRS and Lille University. The topic of my research remains very similar to my Buck Fellowship project. I have since published a dozen papers, several of which build on work I did or started while at the Smithsonian, and I continue working closely with my former NMNH advisors (Dr. Ellen Strong