Department of Plant Biology Associate Professor Stephen Keller was interviewed by Sandra Nnadi, a UVM Plant Biology Department doctoral candidate, about his experience while on sabbatical leave and how the time spent opened opportunities for collaborations and new research projects.
Q. Tell us about yourself.
A. I am a plant evolutionary ecologist interested in the genetically based adaptations of plant populations to their local environments, and how plants may respond differently to climate change. My lab focuses on the local adaptation of forest trees (spruce and poplar), using a combination of genomics, quantitative genetics, and common gardens to study population differentiation and genotype-environment interaction in locally adaptive traits such as phenology, cold tolerance, water-use, and pathogen defense. I’m married and have two boys (ages 16 and 19) and a dog. Our family loves the outdoors, and were big into backcountry skiing in the winter, and hiking and canoe camping in the summer. I also enjoy music a lot. I keep a vinyl record collection that I’m always adding to and enjoy playing guitar and listening to live music.
Q. How was the transition to sabbatical leave?
A. In terms of daily work life, I’d say one of the most notable parts of the transition was the lack of meetings every day! Its amazing how much of our schedule as faculty members is made up of meetings outside of the classes we teach and the research we do. It can be really challenging to find uninterrupted time for activities that require deep thought, like writing, data analysis, or creative brainstorming about new directions. That’s what sabbatical is all about, but it was a big transition to have this chunk of available time. Its been great: really refreshing and productive.
Q. How has the experience been so far?
A. I worked on writing several new research proposals, one of which is focused on alpine plants that live in the harsh environments above treeline on the highest peaks in northeast, like Mt Mansfield in Vermont and others throughout New England. These species have remarkable adaptations to the extremes of temperature and exposure that characterize these environments but are also potentially very vulnerable to climate change. I used my sabbatical to immerse myself in the literature on alpine plant biodiversity and their physiological and evolutionary adaptations to life above the trees, and to develop new relationships with the scientific community both here in the northeast and internationally that are working on studying and conserving alpine plant biodiversity.
I’m excited about a new collaboration with researchers at the University of Maine that resulted in the submission of an National Science Foundation proposal, to study the history of alpine plant biodiversity in the northeast since the end of the last ice age up to the present. We’ve proposed an interdisciplinary approach that combines paleoecology, population genomics, and field surveys and experiments to look at how these communities and particular species within them evolved over the last 10,000+ years, and how that shaped the pattern of biodiversity we see today and its potential to respond to current climate change. It’s probably the most interdisciplinary proposal I’ve ever been involved in, which is very exciting for me.
Another sabbatical activity that I really enjoyed was traveling to the Alps (to the original alpine) where I met with a variety of researchers who have been studying alpine plant biodiversity in these high mountains. During this trip I participated in a population genomics workshop in the French Alps, as a keynote speaker and guest instructor on computational approaches to predicting climate maladaptation. I also gave a research seminar at the University of Grenoble in France. A highlight of the trip was getting to visit one of the worlds largest botanical gardens dedicated to alpine plants, the Jardin Botanique Alpin du Lautaret.