This ScienceLives article was provided to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Ever since Sarah Bronson had her first scientific interaction with a lizard that she caught herself, she has possessed an enduring interest in the scientific process. Now, as an associate professor of psychology, philosophy and neuroscience at Georgia State University and director of the Comparative Economics and Behavioral Studies Laboratory, Brosnan does research with nonhuman primates as well as with human children and adults at the Language Research Center of Georgia State University and the Michale E. Keeling Center for Comparative Medicine and Research of the UT/MD Anderson Cancer Center. 

Brosnan’s interests lie in the complexities of social behavior and cognition. More specifically, she studies primates and their social interactions, in particular decision-making involving cooperation, inequity, and bartering, primarily using economic games. If you have ever seen the famous video in which a capuchin monkey strenuously objects to receiving unequal pay (a cucumber as opposed to a grape), you are familiar with this line of inquiry. You can watch Brosnan conducting the experiment here.

By studying primates, Brosnan works to understand the evolution of cooperative and economic decision-making so as to better understand how and why humans make the decisions that they do. Using an experimental economics approach allows for a standardized methodology that she can use to compare different non-human species as well as humans, which allows for more profound insight in to the evolution of decision-making behavior. In the video accompanying this article, Brosnan talks about her work.

Name: Sarah Brosnan Age: 38 Institution: Georgia State University Field of Study: Psychology, Ethology, Evolution of decision making, Cognitive Science

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. See the ScienceLives archive. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

This ScienceLives article was provided to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Elizabeth Hobson's research has taken her to the remote fields of Argentina to study monk parakeets and also to the jungles of suburbia in the United States to study invasive populations in their feral ranges and in captivity. 

Today, as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, Hobson mines the data she has collected to investigate the social complexity of the parrots, as well as other species. She wants to know how animals think about their social worlds and what motivates their social interactions. 

Approaching these questions from a quantitative perspective reveals patterns that she and her colleagues could not necessarily observe in the field.

Below, she answers our 10 questions.

Name: Elizabeth Hobson Institution: National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis Field of Study: Behavioral ecology

The National Science Foundation: What is your field and why does it inspire you? 

Elizabeth Hobson: I am a behavioral ecologist, which means I study how animals behave in their environments. I seek to determine how animals socially interact with one another and the types of social structures that are found in groups. For example, groups can be structured into dominance hierarchies where individuals are ranked. Those ranks often influence an individual's access to food or mates. Breaking down these complex behaviors into simpler patterns or rules provides insight into how animals think about their social worlds, which I find really fascinating.

NSF: What is the primary aim of your research? 

E.H.: The long-term goal of my research is to understand how and why animals interact with one another, how they choose which others to interact with, and how that impacts both the individual and the group. I also want to understand how the actions of individuals form a group-level social structure and why certain species form more complex societies than others.

NSF: Describe your current research.

E.H.: Understanding why some species, such as primates and humans, exhibit complex social structures is a topic of long-standing and fundamental interest in biology. However, there aren't standardized ways to define or quantify levels of social complexity. Most methods can really only be applied to certain groups, like primates, but don't work as well when applied to another group, like parrots. In my current research, I am developing new ways to think about and measure social complexity from a broader perspective. This will allow me to begin to compare sociality across species to start to figure out how different social structures evolved and why some species live within more complex societies.

NSF: What is the biggest obstacle to achieving your objective(s)? 

E.H.: The biggest obstacles I face in my current research are defining social complexity and dealing with missing data. Defining what "social complexity" means and deciding which types of interactions and sociality should be considered "complex" is a tricky problem. Developing a definition for social complexity, and a way to measure it, is a major part of my current work. Because I'm interested in understanding how complex sociality developed and evolved, I also need to be able to compare sociality across lots of different species, so finding a measure of social complexity that is general enough to allow for broad comparisons but specific enough to be meaningful is also quite tricky. The other big obstacle is that for many species, we really don't actually know how individuals interact or what types of social structures may be present. Without these data, it's difficult to begin to compare complexity across species.

NSF: How does your work benefit society?

E.H.: Humans are generally thought of as having the highest social complexity of any species, but certain levels of social complexity are also found in many primates, as well as marine mammals like whales and dolphins, social carnivores like hyenas, and some birds like parrots and crows. A better understanding of why some species have complex sociality and how complex sociality developed and evolved could provide insight into how we gained our own social structures and cognitive abilities. 

NSF: What do you like best about your work?

E.H.: I've had the chance to do biological field work in some really amazing places and work with some captivating species. My work has taken me from studying parrots and endangered sea birds in the Caribbean, to parrots in the rainforests of Peru, to migrating hawks in the mountains of Nevada, to songbirds in Oregon, and endangered honeycreepers in Hawaii. Being in these areas for an extended field season gives me a unique opportunity to really get to know these new environments.

For me, it's also fascinating to collect social data in the field, where so many things can be happening at once. As an observer, it's almost impossible to pick out the really subtle patterns in the data. It's only when I start to analyze the data quantitatively that I can begin uncovering these patterns buried in this complex data. For example, it's often pretty easy to figure out which birds in a group are at the top and bottom of a dominance hierarchy, but for the middle-ranked birds, it's much harder to keep track of which individual is ranked above another. Determining the full rank order for a larger group is something that I do back in the lab using more quantitative methods. Making sense of these data provides a window into the social lives of these animals, which is really exciting.

NSF: What has been your most discouraging professional moment and how did you recover? What did you learn? 

E.H.: Much of my previous work has been with parrots, where I studied different species in the wild and in captivity. Parrots are sometimes frustrating to work with because it sometimes seemed like they were plotting to ruin my research. For example, one year I was in a remote area of Argentina doing field work with the monk parakeets. I had planned how I was going to put colored plastic bands on the legs of birds I caught so that when I released them, I could tell which individual was which.

Unfortunately, the birds did not cooperate. Many of the birds were able to chew right through the bands, which then fell off. Even the birds that kept the bands were a problem – in the freezing weather of the Argentine winter, they fluffed up their feathers and sat on their feet, so I couldn't see their legs at all, much less the bands.

I needed to come up with a new marking solution on short notice, and without the possibility of getting another tag manufactured and shipped from the U.S., so I needed to work with local materials. My field site was on an active ranch and I noticed that all the sheep were tagged on their ears with numbered plastic tags. Eureka! I got a bag from the local hardware store and modified the tags so that they could be hung around the parakeets' necks like necklaces. Working in remote locations taught me to approach research problems from a very creative perspective in order to come up with solutions and work with available materials. 

NSF: What is the best professional advice you ever received?

E.H.: One of my committee members used to tell me "Just don't quit." Science can be a long and frustrating process at times, but it pays off for the persistent. The ability to work around problems and bounce back and learn from setbacks is really essential and ultimately often makes the science better in the long run.

NSF: What is the most surprising aspect of your work?

E.H.: Before getting into science, I didn't know that creativity was such a big part of the scientific process. I need to be creative in thinking about different ways to approach theoretical problems, creative in designing methods to get at these new questions, creative in writing up and interpreting the results in a way that makes sense and creative in thinking about new ways to present results and data in ways that are intuitive to understand.

I was also surprised at how important strong writing skills are in science. Writing journal articles is the main way that we scientists communicate our results to one another, so the ability to write clearly is really essential. There's a lot of creative energy that goes into designing an article with a clearly constructed argument. It's especially important to effectively communicate the results of the study and also to put those results into context with previous research. 

NSF: What exciting developments lie in the future for your field?

E.H.: As a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, I am currently branching out from my roots as a field biologist and learning new skills that will allow me to use a more computational and mathematical approach to my research. These new skills will allow me to approach scientific questions from a different angle. Using this new more mathematical perspective will be very valuable in understanding how and why animals interact and how different social structures compare across species.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. See the ScienceLives archive. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

This ScienceLives article was provided to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

A mathematician at heart, Angela Peace applies her powers of quantitative reasoning to biological problems. As a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, Peace uses mathematical modeling to determine the effect of phosphorus pollution from fertilization run-off on the food web dynamics of freshwater lakes. She wants to know how small planktonic crustaceans called Daphnia and algae grow in different phosphorus levels. As human activity continues to alter the balance of nutrient cycles in the natural environment, the questions that Peace asks and the answers she seeks through mathematics have become increasingly more urgent.

Name: Angela Peace Age: 27 Institution: National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis Hometown: Tempe, AZ Field of Study: Mathematical Biology

The National Science Foundation: What is your field and why does it inspire you?

Angela Peace: Ever since I was young, math was always my favorite subject in school. I liked the challenges and rewards offered by problem solving. I knew that I wanted to work in a field that uses applied mathematics. During my undergrad days, I was introduced to the world of mathematical biology. This is a field that uses math modeling and analysis to help us better understand the world we live in. Here math can be used to help solve all different kinds of biological problems, such as determining vaccination strategies to prevent epidemics or helping conservation efforts by improving our understanding of nutrient cycling and population dynamics. Discovering this field was exciting for me. It offered opportunities for using applied mathematics to solve all kinds of diverse questions proposed by biological phenomena. [Math Careers Just Don't Add Up For Women ]

NSF: Please describe your current research.

A.P.: Currently, I am working on modeling consumer-producer populations in order to study the effects of food quality on consumer dynamics. I am investigating the growth response of Daphnia, which are small planktonic crustaceans, and algae under varying phosphorus levels. My collaborators and I use a framework called “ecological stoichiometry,” which considers the balance of multiple chemicals in ecological interactions, to develop mathematical models. The models are used to help determine the effects of phosphorus pollution, introduced via fertilization run off, on the food web dynamics of freshwater lakes. 

NSF: What is the primary aim of your research? / What is your primary professional goal?

A.P.: My research aims to improve the predictive power of theoretical population ecology. As human activities continue to alter environmental balances and nutrient cycles, it is becoming vital to understand how these changes can impact the environment. Throughout my career, I hope to shed light on the mathematical and physical properties in many complex biological systems. I believe that mathematically modeling the essential elements and their interactions using ecological stoichiometry is one the best tools we have to better understanding this world. 

NSF: What is the biggest obstacle to achieving your objective(s)?

A.P.: One of the biggest obstacles to successful math-biology modeling is gaining enough insight into the biological complexities to develop a useful model. A useful model needs to capture the correct dynamics while remaining tractable, and it must avoid being overly complex. Approximations are needed — the hard part is figuring out which approximations are appropriate to make. Strong collaborations with ecologists and comparisons with empirical data are required to help overcome this obstacle. 

NSF: What do you like best about your work? 

A.P.: I like so many things about my work! It’s challenging and rewarding and constantly presents different problems to tackle. I am always learning something new, whether it’s a unique aspect of biology or an introduction to a new mathematical concept used in modeling. I have to collaborate with others, so I get the opportunity to work with great and impressive researchers with diverse specialties. 

NSF: Which professional accomplishment are you most proud of?

 A.P.: As a graduate student I was fortunate to have the opportunity to mentor an undergrad with her honors thesis. Her research project involved measuring feeding rates of Daphnia, small planktonic crustaceans. It was very rewarding to help her design her experiment and watch her take ownership of her research. I was so proud of her excitement for her thesis. I definitely want to be involved in teaching and mentoring students throughout my career.

NSF: What is the best professional advice you ever received? 

A.P.: A few years ago someone told me the best way to succeed in research is to read. You should read as many scientific research papers as you can. Try to get through a couple papers each week. That might not seem like a lot at first, but many of these papers are scientific and dense. There is so much new research going on out there that it is impossible to keep up with everything, but constantly reading will help give you an idea of what is known and where the gaps are. 

NSF: What exciting developments lie in the future for your field? 

A.P.: Mathematical biology has a very bright future. The incredible amount of data that’s being collected these days will advance both mathematics and biology. There are ever-increasing amounts of data on all sorts of systems, from gene regulation and the evolution of genomes to climate change and global chemical cycles, as well as the growth and treatment of cancers. Data will help validate models, which will in turn help interpret the data. Mathematical biology is a growing field with a very exciting future. 

NSF: Who is your #1 hero and why?

A.P.: In the early 1900s, Alfred J. Lotka developed fundamental contributions to theoretical ecology, stressing the important role of math in the biological sciences. He developed a predator-prey model that became the base framework of many ecological models. His 1925 book, “Elements of Physical Biology,” has great insight as he describes the entire world as a living system. Lotka fundamentally contributed to this field and gave us hope that it may be possible to break down the enormous complexities of biological systems and understand them. 

NSF: What do you do when you’re not in the lab or out in the field? 

A.P.: I am quite fond of riding my bicycle. I am all about enjoying a nice long ride on a good road bike. It’s good for clearing your mind and it’s nice to spend time outdoors. 

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. See the ScienceLives archive. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

Lily Whiteman is a media officer for the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). She contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

Some good news for coral reefs: In 2014, President Obama expanded the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument in the central Pacific from about 87,000 square miles to 308,000 square miles. The Monument "is the largest marine protected area in the world and an important part of the most widespread collection of marine life on the planet under a single country's jurisdiction," according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

This area sustains a diversity of species, including some of the most pristine coral reefs in the world , as well as a diversity of fish species, shellfish, marine mammals, seabirds, land birds, insects and vegetation not found anywhere else.

Payback from protection

Fishing, energy exploration and other activities are prohibited in the Monument. Among the Monument's protected corals are expansive shallow coral reefs and deep coral forests, including some corals that are 5,000 years old.

The expansion of the monument is promising in light of benefits that may be provided by marine protected areas (MPAs). An MPA is a coastal or offshore marine area that is managed to protect natural and/or cultural resources.

In the accompanying video, Paul Sikkel, of Arkansas State University, discusses some of the possible successes of the MPA system in the Philippines. This system was developed back in the early 1970s, when reef fisheries were left virtually unmanaged, and destructive fishing practices, often organized by large commercial fishing companies, ran rampant throughout the Philippines — a cluster of 7,107 islands that harbors more than 1,700 reef species and about 9 percent of global coral reef area. [The 10 Most Pristine Places on Earth ]

Power to the people

To help protect its marine resources, the Philippines established at least 985 MPAs covering almost 5 percent of coastal municipal waters. To a large degree, the Philippine MPAs are now co-managed by local communities and local governments along with the national government. This partial de-centralization of authority helps give responsibility for MPA management to those who depend on their ecological health the most: coastal communities.

The Philippine MPAs still fall short of the national goal for coverage area, and conservation enforcement problems remain. Nevertheless, some evidence suggests that the Philippine community-based management system may have generated some conservation victories.

For example, a study published in 2010 showed that species richness of large predatory reef fish increased fourfold over a 14-year period in one Philippine MPA and 11-fold over a 15-year period in another Philippine MPA. The study also showed that as species richness increased in complexity within one of the MPAs, this type of complexity also increased within neighboring fished areas — evidently because of a spillover effect from the MPA.

But even while MPA status may provide protection from local threats, such as pollution or anchor damage, MPAs may remain vulnerable to global threats, such as climate change, which cannot be controlled at local levels.

In the accompanying video, Sikkel also discusses a new mechanism that may be damaging coral reef ecosystems in the Caribbean.  Sikkel identified this potential mechanism through his National Science Foundation-funded research on the relationships between parasites and their host fishes in Caribbean reefs.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. See the ScienceLives archive. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

This ScienceLives article was provided to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

The interplay of plant communities and the processes that influence their evolution fascinate Caroline Farrior, who, as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, builds mathematical models to better understand and predict plant behavior. Of particular interest to her is how wind storms, drought and other rare environmental disturbances affect forests. Farrior wants to know how these events shape plant communities and how plants respond in the absence of disturbances, when they have already expended effort to prepare for these rare events. With this understanding, Farrior aims to help ecologists make better predictions about how climate change will affect plant communities in the future.

Name: Caroline Farrior Age: 30 Institution: National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis Hometown: Tulsa, Oklahoma Field of Study: Plant ecology

The National Science Foundation: What is your field and why does it inspire you?

Caroline Farrior: I am a plant ecologist. I study how plants interact as individuals and as species. They have thousands of years of evolutionary history shaping their genetic makeup, yet any one individual finds itself only in a particular and new environment in competition with specific individuals and species. Thinking about the influence of the depth of time on the individual plants in communities in front of me is absolutely inspiring. [When You Stray From a Trail, Invasive Species Follow ]

NSF: Please describe your current research. 

C.F.: The effects of rare climatic events like drought and heavy winds have been historically difficult to study, precisely because of their rarity. These events nonetheless seem to play a fundamental role in shaping plant community composition and forest structure. Strategies that prepare plants for rare events can be costly in terms of growth and fecundity in the absence of the disturbance. I am currently developing the mathematical tools needed to examine the interactions between rare disturbances and competition among individuals, their influence on population dynamics, and ecosystem level properties.

NSF: What is the primary aim of your research? / What is your primary professional goal?

C.F.: Currently, our best estimates show that plants are taking up about one quarter of the carbon emitted by humans  into the atmosphere. Plants make their bodies out of carbon. When there is more carbon in the atmosphere they can take up more of it, scrubbing, slowing the rate of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, we are not sure whether we will be able to count on plants to continue to do this in the future. For instance, we are not sure whether plants will become limited by other essential resources or how the changes in carbon storage of plants may interact with other changes across the globe, including increasing temperatures, changing rainfall regimes, and more frequent extreme climatic events. My goal is to build an understanding of the role of plants in the global carbon cycle so that as scientists we may be able to predict the path of climate change accurately. 

NSF: What is the biggest obstacle to achieving your objective(s)? 

C.F.: Ecology is a young science. We are still working out many very basic components of plants. At the same time, because of today’s pressing environmental issues, we are asked to answer many high level questions and apply our knowledge to solve today’s problems. Many of these questions are not a natural next step from our established knowledge, but they still need attention. To make real progress, there is a delicate balance that must be struck between doing the needed fundamental research and the applied work that updates our understanding for policymakers. 

NSF: How does your work benefit society?

C.F.: I work toward a better understanding of the role of plants in the global carbon cycle . With this understanding, as scientists, we will be able to more accurately predict the pace of climate change in the future. With better predictions of the rate of climate change, politicians are more likely to be able to write and pass effective legislation to mitigate climate change.  

NSF: What do you like best about your work?

C.F.: I love the feeling of understanding something complex. When the pieces come together from field observations or experiments with a prediction from a model, understanding can suddenly become clear. The best results are those that seem so obvious and simple after discovering them. 

NSF: What would your Tweet say about your work? 

C.F.: Interestingly, trees engage in game theory, with their investment in fine roots in competition for water and nitrogen, and wood in competition for light. 

NSF: What is the best professional advice you ever received? 

C.F.: Work on questions that interest you! This advice can never be said enough. If you are genuinely interested in the science you do, everything comes easier and the work is more fun. Let your curiosity drive you!

NSF: What exciting developments lie in the future for your field? 

C.F.: Plant ecologists have studied the aboveground biomass of individuals and their species for over a century now. But what goes on below ground is still largely a mystery. With new and more cost-effective technology for studying the identity of specific root fragments and the community composition of microbial symbionts, we are beginning to see below ground of plants with much greater resolution. 

NSF: What do you do when you’re not in the lab or out in the field? 

C.F.: When I’m not working, I like to get outside and go exploring. I’ll go hiking and see some new waterfalls or mountain views. Or I’ll go kayaking and try to clear my head while paddling on a quiet lake.  

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. See the ScienceLives archive. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

This ScienceLives article was provided to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

The fascinating and mysterious images of marine life in the ocean depths depicted in the documentary films of Jacque Cousteau inspired Ioannis Sgouralis to study the life sciences, and from there, human physiology. As a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, Sgouralis creates computer models of the kidney to assess the organ’s behavior under a range of conditions. The models can help researchers better understand how severe illnesses such as hypertension or diabetes progress and thereby help develop more effective prevention and treatment strategies. 

Name: Ioannis Sgouralis Age: 28 Institution: National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis Hometown: Kalampaka, Greece Field of Study: Mathematical Biology

The National Science Foundation: What is your field and why does it inspire you?

Ioannis Sgouralis: My expertise is in mathematical biology , which is part of the broader area of applied mathematics. In particular, I use mathematics to answer questions that arise in the branch of physiology. Most of my work deals with the development and analysis of computational models of processes that are only theoretically tractable since experimental and clinical limitations render them inaccessible otherwise. [Math Models Predict Climate Change Effects ]

NSF: Please describe your current research.

I.S.: Currently, I am developing a mathematical model of the kidney. The goal of the project is to represent the fundamental processes carried out by the kidney and use this knowledge to assess the organ's behavior under a range of physiologic and pathophysiologic conditions. With the resulting model I hope to shed some light on the progressive stages of severe illnesses like hypertension or diabetes that are related to kidney malfunction.

NSF: How does your work benefit society?

I.S.: A significant part of my work deals with the development of computational models. Such models can be used to test hypotheses and proposed practices without having to perform expensive, time consuming and often impossible experiments. The analysis of the models can reveal mechanisms that result in lack of physiologic control and eventually development of diseases. A good understanding of the properties of those mechanisms can help toward the development of efficient prevention and treatment strategies. To that end, my work has the potential of influencing clinical practice.

NSF: What do you like best about your work?

I.S.: Two characteristics that I enjoy most are, first, the chance to solve problems that have the potential of improving everyday life, and second, the specific methods involved. Mathematical modeling demands interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration with scientists from diverse backgrounds, such as physiologists, clinicians, computer scientists, physicists, and engineers.

NSF: What would your Tweet say about your work?

I.S.: My tweets would probably not be very exciting, as they would say something like, "Need data concerning kidney's response to…" or "Looking for the best way to model the effect of…”

NSF: What is the best professional advice you ever received?

I.S.: When I was an undergraduate, a professor once said to me, "A scientist needs to know the limits of the methods he makes use of. Often, it is more important to know when he cannot apply a method rather than when he can." I have considered this advice several times in my career so far.

NSF: What is the most surprising aspect of your work?

I.S.: I believe surprise is the very essence of using mathematics to track biological questions. A common belief is that areas so different, by definition only, like math and bio have nothing in common. However, modern scientific practice exposes vast overlapping, where methods of one field are applied to seek solutions to problems of the other.

NSF: What exciting developments lie in the future for your field?

I.S.: So far we have been able to build models of several individual organs that form the body of mammals. As the number of the available models increases, it is possible that in the future we will be able to combine them into a single model that will represent the whole body. Such a model could be used to simulate human physiology in its most general setting. Given this possibility, the number of questions about human health and disease that could be addressed is unlimited.

NSF: Who is your number one hero and why?

I.S.: My number one hero is, undoubtedly, the marine explorer Jacques Cousteau. When I was young, I was excited about Cousteau's documentaries of marine life, which I used to watch passionately. Those films, full of oceanic images and Cousteau's inspiring personality, decisively influenced me to get involved in the life sciences.

NSF: What do you do when you’re not in the lab or out in the field?

I.S.: In my free time I enjoy reading literature, mostly novels. My reading spans a wide range of literature, from classic to modern, with the most recent ones centering on science and crime fiction. Among my favorite authors are Jules Verne, Arthur Clarke, and William Faulkner.

Follow all of the Expert Voices issues and debates — and become part of the discussion — on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. See the ScienceLives archive. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on Live Science.

This ScienceLives article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

A childhood love of drawing and an innate curiosity brought Sandy Kawano to the field of integrative morphology, a branch of biology dealing with the study of the form and structure of organisms and their specific features. She studies diversity in animal body shapes. As a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS), Kawano investigates the different methods used to analyze how natural selection influences morphology. At NIMBioS, she aims to develop an open-source, user-friendly computer program that would provide a systematic approach for measuring how selection on morphology can contribute to evolution and generate biodiversity.

Name: Sandy Kawano Age: 29 Institution: National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis Hometown: San Jose, California Field of Study: Integrative morphology

National Science Foundation: What is your field and why does it inspire you?

Sany Kawano: I am an integrative morphologist, so I employ a variety of techniques to understand how and why so many diverse body shapes have arisen in animals over time. Art played a major role in my love for morphology. When I was young, I would draw quite regularly and was intrigued by how diverse animals were. As I would draw my pet fishes, I wondered why I had to draw my goldfish with a short body and fan-shaped tail, but my algae sucker fish was long and slender. Why should they look so different when they both live in water? Why don’t organisms stick to one basic body shape? 

However, I didn’t decide to study morphology until I worked as an undergraduate in the lab of Professor Peter Wainwright at the University of California, Davis. He and his lab taught me about the field of functional morphology, which answered exactly the types of questions that have plagued me for my entire life. Integrative morphology inspires me because it provides a comprehensive approach to answering why the world is so diverse, what creates this diversity, and how the inspiration that we receive from nature can be applied to benefit our own lives. 

NSF: Please describe your current research.

S.K.: For my postdoctoral research at NIMBioS, I am evaluating the analyses used to quantify how natural selection operates to shape the morphology of organisms. Russell Lande and Stevan Arnold wrote a seminal paper in 1983 that provided a quantitative method to estimate how strong selection was operating to change a morphological trait and in what way, which has served an important role in understanding how natural selection can contribute to evolution and the generation of biodiversity. Lande and Arnold’s work in this area has inspired thousands of studies, including new approaches for quantifying selection, but we still face numerous challenges in understanding how selection operates, especially on larger sets of data. A number of these challenges are due to analytical limitations or disagreement over how to best handle these challenges. For my current work, I am developing a synthesis of the current status of estimating selection on morphology, with an emphasis on the strengths and weaknesses of the various methods used to quantify selection. Ultimately, my plan is to develop an open-source, user-friendly computer program that would provide a more systematic approach for measuring how selection on morphology can serve as a major driver of evolution. 

NSF: What do you like best about your work? 

S.K.: How dynamic my job is! When people hear that I am a morphologist, they often think: “So you work on bones and dead stuff?” Although a good portion of my work has involved taking direct measurements of anatomical structures (e.g., bones, muscles), those data are only one piece to solving the puzzle. I also implement statistics, mathematical modeling, high-speed videography, computer programming, engineering, and recently began developing 3-D models of fossil bones. My research has taken me to British Columbia, the island of Hawai’i, Spain, Uruguay and across the continental United States. A day in my life has included snorkeling to catch fish, driving boats to catch fish on near shore islands, visiting natural history museums across the United States, producing 3-D models of fossils with a laser scanner and then replicating them with a 3-D printer, generating computer code running several thousands of lines, sharing the fruits of my scientific labor with others through classroom lectures and conference presentations, and even serving as a scientific consultant for the entertainment industry. I also met Professor Neil Shubin, who wrote the book Your Inner Fish, which inspired my doctoral work. I’m living my wildest dreams with my career. 

NSF: What would your Tweet say about your work? What would your elevator speech say?

S.K.: Morphology is fun(ctional)! Actually, that’s already on my Twitter profile. Morphology is functional because not only can it tell us about what a structure is capable of and be applied to benefit various aspects of our lives, but it can also be a fun career! 

Morphology is not a “dead” subject as many have falsely presumed. It is as alive and diverse as the awe-inspiring creatures whose “beautiful forms” have caught our curiosity, inspired our lives, and left us breathless as far back as we can remember. Morphology can serve as an explanatory tool, helping us infer the biology of extinct animals whose clues lie hidden in their fossils. Yet, it also has many other important applications. The link between morphology and function has been so prevalent in nature and influential in our lives that it has led to bio-inspired inventions, such as hypodermic needles resembling the inconspicuous feeding tube of the mosquito, the Mercedes-Benz boxfish-inspired car providing a roomy yet streamlined vehicle, and airplane wings that get much of their energy-conserving design from aerodynamic bird wings. My research focuses on unraveling how different morphologies emerge and why, in order to understand the factors that drive the diversity of creatures, both living and extinct. I have studied how the morphological transformations from finned fishes to limbed tetrapods (four-legged animals) influenced the evolutionary invasion of land in vertebrate animals, how fishes use different body plans to climb waterfalls, and I am now attempting to improve the technique used to measure how morphological diversity is generated. 

NSF: Which professional accomplishment are you most proud of? / What stands out as your crowning achievement? 

S.K.: I am grateful to have more than one! First, when one of the undergraduate students in my vertebrate biology lab signed up to become an undergraduate teaching assistant a year after taking my lab, she said that the reason she was there was because I inspired her to pursue research and teach others about why we should love vertebrate biology. Whether she knew it or not, that was my proudest moment as an instructor. Yes, receiving awards, publishing papers, delivering presentations, etc., are all rewarding experiences, but motivating the next generation of scientists is whole new level of satisfaction. Second, joining the amazing team at NIMBioS, as a postdoctoral research associate, has been a major triumph in my career. I am honored to work amongst some of the most extraordinary mathematicians and scientists, and have hit a major milestone in acquiring the mathematical and computational skills to help launch my career and mold my research program. 

NSF: On the other hand, what has been your most discouraging professional moment and how did you recover? What did you learn?

S.K.: My most discouraging professional moment occurred as I was graduating high school. I had my heart set on obtaining a B.S. in evolution, ecology and biodiversity (EEB) at the University of California, Davis (UCD), because it has one of the best EEB programs in the nation. However, I didn’t have the best grades or application and so I was rejected. I was devastated. Rather than treating this as a failure, I took this as a wake-up call to face my weaknesses and prove that I could succeed as a biologist. I enrolled in a community college to complete my general education, studied more efficiently, actively participated in study groups and office hours, decreased my hours at my part-time job, immersed myself in literature, and participated in an honor society. After two years, I finally transferred to UCD. We all face discouraging moments in our lives, but what defines us is not what challenges we face but how we overcome them. I learned that even a big “failure” could become a triumph with enough diligence and perseverance, so every rejection is an opportunity to become a better and stronger scientist.

NSF: What is the best professional advice you ever received?

S.K.: Dr. Roi Holzman, who was a postdoctoral researcher in Professor Wainwright’s lab while I was an undergraduate student, offered me numerous pearls of wisdom and bestowed upon me the best advice I have received thus far: “Think big.” He urged me to focus on what big scientific question I would answer with my experiments, how my results would contribute to the advancement of science, and what broad implications this would have for society. His advice helps me to keep the big picture in mind and prepares me for when I talk to others about why my research is important. It’s because of Roi that I transformed my fascination in amphibious fishes to studying how the evolution from fishes to four-legged vertebrate animals allowed our distant ancestors to move onto land. “Thinking big” also encourages me to constantly look for ways to take a research project to new heights, such as by applying new techniques, approaching an old question from a novel perspective, integrating multiple disciplines for a more comprehensive analysis, and by re-evaluating paradigms in science. Roi’s advice motivates me to dig deeper, aim higher, and go further with every professional endeavor. 

NSF: What is the most surprising aspect of your work?

S.K.: Many people are alarmed at how computational and mathematical morphological studies can be. Although I have spent a fair share of my work out in the field or interacting directly with animals or bones, most of my work is conducted on computers. I own more computers and hard drives than purses. No joke. Mathematics is at the heart and soul of morphology. What do a nautilus shell, sunflowers, and DNA have in common? Their morphology can be explained by math, specifically the Fibonacci sequence. When you measure the length of a bone, that’s a Euclidean distance. Interested in knowing how fast that bone is moving while the animal is running? Calculus is your answer! Some of my friends are shocked when they see that my analyses are scripts with thousands of lines of computer code, or that I rarely use simple statistical approaches as I am trying to account for various aspects of the data in order to obtain a more comprehensive analysis about the patterns emerging. These are all good aspects, though, and coding is actually a lot of fun! 

NSF: What exciting developments lie in the future for your field? 

S.K.: Probably one of the most exciting advancements in the field of morphology (and anatomy) is the explosion of improved computational capabilities, allowing us to explore the relationship between morphology and function at new levels. Biomedical equipment, such as high-powered x-ray machines, allow us to study the fossil bones of animals that are still embedded in rock or the intricate network of soft tissues that surround a bone, for example. Animators and biomechanists use 3-D models of fossil bones and then apply details about the morphology of living animals to bring fossils, such as dinosaurs, to life. The application of increasingly more sophisticated technology with greater knowledge about anatomy and morphology will further improve our models of how different parts of an animal contribute to its overall biology and why those morphological traits persisted or diversified over time. 

NSF: Who is your #1 hero and why?

S.K.: Although I have heroes for different aspects of my life, one of my biggest heroes is my undergraduate adviser, Professor Peter Wainwright. Peter introduced me to the functional morphology and feeding biomechanics of fishes, and I’ve been hooked ever since. In addition to making many important contributions to our understanding about the relationship between morphology and function, such as many-to-one mapping, and spearheading the field of fish-feeding biomechanics, I know of no one else who is willing to go so far above and beyond the call of duty to assist students with attaining their career goals. He reached out to me while I was an undergraduate student and took me under his wing so that I could lead my first independent research project. I will always be grateful to him for giving me a chance at research and helping me live up to my potential. Over the years he has given me valuable words of advice and kind words of encouragement, demonstrated how to foster community within the lab, and actively assisted my professional development. His immense enthusiasm, devotion and appreciation for science and teaching are inspiring and are what encouraged me to pursue a career as an integrative morphologist. 

NSF: What do you do when you’re not in the lab or out in the field? 

S.K.: When I get the spare chance, I love to be outdoors and particularly enjoy fishing, hiking and trail running. I have also recently taken up photography and scuba diving. Nature is a constant source of inspiration for me, and I use the patterns that I see in nature to fuel my curiosity in understanding why there are so many different organisms, why they live where they do, why they move and eat they way they do. Even after spending all day reading scientific articles, I still enjoy reading outside of work. I’m a big fan of books by biomechanist Steve Vogel and also enjoy reading about conservation biology and the philosophy of science. One of my favorite books is A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold; I love his ability to write with such eloquence and conviction about maintaining biodiversity by promoting scientific ethics, and I refer back to his book any time I need a pick-me-up. I also love watching bad monster movies, especially if it has “mecha,” “super,” “mega” or “versus” in the title. What can I say, I’m happy being a nerd! 

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Cultural anthropologist Natasha Schüll bridged the gap between human interaction and machine workings in her research on gambling. Her book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, published in 2012, was borne as a result of an undergraduate thesis she began at age 19. In it, she examines the connection between compulsive gamblers and the design of the slot machines they play. Also, Schüll directed the documentary, BUFFET: All You Can Eat Las Vegas, showcasing the “designed gluttony” of the Vegas buffet scene. The film has screened in film festivals and on PBS. 

Her current research focuses on the design and use of self-tracking devices — such as when individuals use digital software to record and graphically visualize personal data — and examines what these behaviors say about society’s changing cultural and political values.

Schüll is an associate professor at MIT’s Program in Science, Technology and Society and received her B.A. and PhD from University of California, Berkeley. 

Name: Natasha Schüll Age: 43 Institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Field of Study: Anthropology

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

A serendipitous encounter between Patricia Wright, then a social worker, and an owl monkey in a New York City pet store in 1968 ultimately inspired Wright to reinvent herself — eventually becoming an award-winning Ph.D. scientist and conservationist devoted to saving lemurs. Lemurs are a primate found naturally only in Madagascar — the world’s fourth largest island, located about 250 miles off the coast of southern Africa.

One of the World’s Most Endangered Primates

In 2012, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature described 91 percent of the 103 known species and subspecies of lemurs as threatened with extinction; this is one of the highest levels of threat ever recorded for a group of mammals.  

Because of Madagascar’s island isolation, most of its plant and animal species are found nowhere else in the world. Nevertheless, 79 percent of Madagascar’s original rain forest habitat has already been cleared by humans.  

Multifaceted Approaches

A professor at Stony Brook University, Wright’s approaches to saving Madagascar’s lemurs  and their forest habitat involves combining science and conservation. “You can’t save what you don’t understand,” she says.

Wright’s many scientific and conservation achievements include working with the Madagascar government to create Ranomafana National Park in Madagascar in 1991. The Park protects 43,500 hectares of forest, including rain forests, and 12 lemur species. In addition, Wright is the founder of the Centre ValBio Research Station located on the edge of the Park. Centre ValBio, which is partially funded by the National Science Foundation, is a pivotal hub for researching rainforest biodiversity  and conservation and for conducting outreach to the community and policy makers. [Thanks, Dad. Owl Monkeys Are Caring Fathers, Too]

Wright partners with Malagasy villagers to develop conservation strategies that are scientifically sound and give villagers a stake in the sustainability of Madagascar’s rainforests. With more than 75 percent of Madagascar’s population surviving on or below $1.25 per day, these solutions include promoting ecotourism. 

An Award-Winning Career

Throughout her career, Wright has received many awards, including the MacArthur “Genius Award” in 1989. On May 12, 2014, Wright was named the 2014 winner of the Indianapolis Prize, the world’s leading award for animal conservation. Three days later, Wright—accompanied by several lemurs—rang the New York Stock Exchange’s Closing Bell. 

Along with gaggles of jumping and leaping lemurs—Wright is featured in the new IMAX film, Island of Lemurs: Madagascar, which is currently playing throughout the U.S. Also, Wright recently described her early research on owl monkeys and adventures in South American rain forests in High Moon Over the Amazon: My Quest to Understand the Monkeys of the Night (Lantern Books: 2013). 

Name: Patricia Wright Institution: Stony Brook University Field of Study: Anthropology, primatology, conservation

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

On the volcanic island of Bali, rice farmers have evolved an approach to their livelihoods that blends religion, ecological knowledge and an egalitarian water-distribution system that for centuries sustained rice harvests on both mountain terraces and flat lands. This cooperative farming system, known as subak, dates to the 11^th century and represents profound historical knowledge of the workings of Bali’s agricultural ecosystem, including how to deal with crop pests. With support from the National Science Foundation, anthropologist Steve Lansing used computer simulations to show that the Balinese subaks are a real-world example of a complex adaptive system, in which the optimal harvests for hundreds of subaks emerge from local cooperative interactions. [Planting the Seed of Sustainable Farming: Op-Ed ]

Lansing has been studying subaks since the 1970s. During the so-called "Green Revolution" of the same decade, the subaks became compromised. Hoping to increase rice yields, farmers were told to plant as often as possible, and set aside their traditional system of cooperative irrigation scheduling. But within a year or two, farmers saw a devastating increase in pestilence and water shortages.

In the late 1980s, using observational data and computer simulations, Lansing studied the emergence of the subak system, which has rice paddies become active and go fallow in concert, so there is a period during which pests starve and die off. His results showed that the subak system was far more effective than the Green Revolution approaches, and helped prompt a return to the traditional methods.

Bali’s natural landscape and its subaks are still stressed, however, by factors including increasing urbanization and a growing tourism trade. In 2012, Lansing’s research was used to win recognition for the subaks as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Now he is working with Julia Watson, an assistant professor of architecture at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, to design a sustainable World Heritage destination that will preserve the culture , benefit the people of Bali and serve as a model for other World Heritage cultural landscapes.

Lansing is director of the Complexity Institute at Nanyang Technological University. He also is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, professor Emeritus at the University of Arizona and senior fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, which advances research on the governance of social-ecological systems (such as the subaks), with a special emphasis on resilience. He is author of many books, including Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali, Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali, The Balinese and The Three Worlds of Bali.

In the following video, Lansing answers our 10 questions.

Name: Steve Lansing

Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Field of Study: Anthropology

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Matthew Zefferman applies his enthusiasm for solving puzzles to the research he does every day, investigating how human culture influences modern society. Such puzzles can be solved mathematically. As a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, Zefferman uses network theory and evolutionary game theory to investigate the origins of complex political and economic institutions. Currently focused on the origins of war, he is looking at how changes in ideology influence the probability that two countries will go to war. Zefferman’s mathematical models confirm a common assumption –- when countries’ leaders become more ideologically similar, the chances of war significantly diminish.

Name: Matthew Zefferman Institution: National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis Field of Study: Evolutionary Social Science

Why did you choose this field?

I was studying engineering in college and eventually realized that the solutions to many important human problems were not primarily technological, but primarily cultural. But I really didn’t have a good sense of what that even meant. So I started reading anthropology  and psychology  looking for a unifying theory. I found a book by Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson called Cultural and the Evolutionary Process that laid out a mathematical theory of cultural change.  And from there I was hooked.

Please describe your current research.

I try to understand how human culture influences modern society. Much of the work in cultural evolution has focused small-scale societies in early human history or pre-history. I am interested in how culture  works in larger scale societies like the ones most of us live in today.

What is the primary aim of your research?

Right now, I am trying to understand the transition from small-scale societies to the earliest forms of political organization, what are called chiefdoms. I am trying to figure out the conditions that are necessary and sufficient for this transition. To do this, I use mathematical modeling, specifically network theory and evolutionary game theory. I also use computer simulations to make sure that they give similar results to the mathematics.

How does your work benefit society?

I hope that my work will help us understand human cooperation and conflict in large political organizations. For example, some of my work has been on the origins of war. I hope that it will give some insight on how to limit the frequency or scale of war. A branch of international relations is very interested in understanding how changes in ideas influence the probability that two countries will go to war. For example, if leaders of two countries become more ideologically similar, does this decrease their likelihood of fighting over a resource? My models suggest that it does.

What do you like best about your work?

I like discovering and solving puzzles. Humans are a very puzzling species, so there is plenty of opportunity.

What is the best professional advice you ever received? 

The best advice I ever received, professional or otherwise, was from my dad when I left for college, “Just try not to do anything stupid.”

What is the most surprising aspect of your work?

Many people are surprised that something as seemingly nebulous as human culture could be expressed mathematically. But there has been a rapidly growing mathematical theory of culture over the past thirty years. For example, it shows why humans evolved to rely more heavily on social learning (i.e., learning from others) than any other species. It also shows how we evolved certain heuristics for what to learn or who to learn from (e.g., learning the most common trait in one's group or learning from the most successful people) and how these heuristics allow us to cooperate with non-relatives to a greater extent than any other species.  My goal is to build on these insights to explain how this cooperation gets extended to even greater scales once we start using formal rules and laws in addition to informal norms.

What exciting developments lie in the future for your field? 

I think there is a growing movement to link ideas about cultural evolution with ideas about political organization. For example, why are similar political systems effective in one country but not in another?  What are the necessary conditions for transitioning from ineffective political organization to effective political organization?  How might we design political systems to be resistant to collapse or exploitation by political elites?

Who is your #1 hero and why?

It is hard to pick just one scientific hero because science is such an inherently social endeavor. But one of my scientific heroes is the late political scientist Elinor Ostrom who developed, and inspired many others to help develop, a process for understanding human institutions from a truly multidisciplinary and multifaceted perspective. Her work integrates mathematical theory, experiments, simulations and importantly, detailed observation of the way humansactually organize themselves into a coherent body of knowledge.

What do you do when you’re not in the lab or out in the field?

I go on long runs, mostly at night, which is when I do some of my best thinking.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Sara Goering's first experimental work with brains was in a learning and memory lab, as an undergraduate majoring in psychology. "It was interesting stuff," she said. "I liked studying brains, and looking for differences in those brains." 

This early experience with brains has come full circle for Goering. It now helps inform her current work with the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering, an Engineering Research Center (ERC), which is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Center researchers are creating new technologies that help restore function and mobility to people with neurological disorders.

Working in an emerging field known as neuroethics, Goering investigates ethical issues that are likely to develop from the use of neural technologies. Her team is currently comparing existing interventions for human bodies and brains to new technologies being developed. As part of this work, the team is seeking out best practices and sharing information with colleagues across the country, including researchers at the Quality of Life Technology ERC, also funded by NSF. 

In 2014, Goering and her colleagues will conduct a study with individuals who have spinal cord injuries to explore potential concerns about technologies and procedures such as spinal microstimulation, human exoskeletons and "smart" prosthetics controlled by brain-computer interfaces.

Name: Sara Goering Institution: University of Washington Hometown: Seattle, Wash. Field of Study: Philosophy

What is your field of research and why did you choose it?

I work in ethics, bioethics and neuroethics. I approach ethics from a philosophical perspective because my Ph.D. is in philosophy. But there are people that do bioethics from legal or religious or other perspectives. I ended up in philosophy in part because I like really big questions that are important, about how we understand ourselves and our place in the world.

What was the best professional advice you ever received?

Early on, it was do what you really love to do. I talked with advisors about whether I should really go into philosophy, or not. By and large they said, "If it's what you love doing, try it. But be aware as you're going for what you really love that it might not work out as a career, so have a back-up plan." As the graduate program director for our department, I share that (advice) with students, too. 

Please describe your current research.

One question we've looked at is: How are pharmaceuticals different from neural engineering? We seem very comfortable using pharmaceuticals to treat different conditions. But are these drugs significantly different in any way from the sorts of interventions we're recommending here? 

We might also compare neural technologies to a cardiac pacemaker or other engineered devices. Those devices seem less close to our sense of identity. 

What are you most proud of?

One of the things that make me most happy about the work I get to do is that people from different schools of thought are collaborating on research. I'm not sitting in philosophy thinking about theories and writing only for other philosophers. I'm trying to do something that will really make a difference. 

What was your biggest laboratory disaster, and how did you deal with it?

One of the things that I had to grapple with was how scientists and engineers look at ethics. I worry that scientists and engineers look at ethics like an oversight, like a finger-shaker, "you can't do that" regulatory hurdle or obstacle to the work that they're doing. 

I want it to be a collaborative practice of trying to think through the big questions about the research. I want to be able to criticize and critique the direction of the research, rather than thinking we need people to figure out it's a good for them. Maybe it's not, and then maybe we want to redirect what we're doing. So this is not a disaster, but it's a tension that is involved in the kind of work that I'm doing.

What would surprise people most about your work?

It might depend on who we're surprising. 

Non-disabled people often see disability as a bad thing: It's an individual problem, a pathology or deficit of the person. A lot of the disability studies work that I've done focuses on a more socio-political association with disability. That's not to say you ignore differences in the body, but you instead emphasize the ways in which environment can be accommodating (or not) to different ways of getting through the world. 

It's surprising to most non-disabled people because they never thought of disability that way. In this work in the center, one of our priorities has been to include what we call "end-user" perspective early on in the process. An end-user is someone who will be using these new technologies.

What advice would you give to an aspiring engineer, scientist or philosopher?

It's important to reach out beyond your main discipline, whatever it happens to be. Doing purely theoretical work isn't going to be productive. You need to know something about other fields. That might mean putting yourself in contact with a lab or getting in touch with a hospital — whatever your specific area of interest is — so that you have that real experience, so you make sure anything you're theorizing about touches down somewhere, that it can make a difference. 

What is the biggest unanswered question in your field?

There are lots of unanswered questions about what neural technologies mean for identity, and moral, legal, privacy issues. 

In one of our testbeds, or research areas, we may have a brain-computer interface that controls a robotic device   If I'm actually controlling it with my thinking, is there a way in which my body schema expands? If the robotic device could extend away from me, is there a way in which now my identity is co-located? It's fascinating what that could do to our notions of identity. It's just unexplored, uncharted territory at this point.

Why should my [mom, kid, sister, grandpa] be excited about your research?

These are technologies that are likely coming. We want to be really clear about what direction they go in, what concerns they bring and how we might address those concerns. It will be too late to address them if the technologies are out and on the market by the time we start thinking about it. It's important to talk about it now. 

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

As a college student, William Bialek found he was drawn to the topics discussed in biology classes, while in physics classes, the way his professors and peers explored questions and problems energized him. He found his bliss in the field of biophysics. The Princeton professor seeks to discover general principles that describe and quantify the workings of biological systems. His wide-ranging research has led to much more precise understandings of such processes as embryonic development and neural coding and computation in the brain.

Bialek's research has shown that systems tend toward optimum performance, bumping up against the limits of what is physically possible. "[I]n many cases biology ... found a way to get right up to the edge of what [is] allowed," he says. This idea — that biological systems operate at some level akin to perfection — competes with traditional views that much of what we see in biological systems is an accident of evolutionary history, rather than a precise match to problems that organisms must solve, he says.

Bialek is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Physical Society and recipient of the Society for Neuroscience's 2013 Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience. Check out this compelling interview with him, including a brief detour into the topic of superheroes.

Name: William Bialek Institution: Princeton University Field of Study: Biophysics

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Nick Matzke is a computational biogeographer at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis. He studies the distribution of plant and animal species, particularly from a historical perspective, taking into account the evolutionary relationships of species over millions of years. Thus, Matzke develops methods that combine historical and ecological biogeography. Viewing species distributions in this manner, he suggests, will help scientists build better models and make stronger predictions about what will happen to species as the climate warms.

Name: Nick Matzke Institution: National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis Field of Study: Computational biogeography

What is your field and why does it inspire you? / Why did you choose this field?

I am a computational biogeographer, which means I study where plant and animal species live, how they got there, and where they might be going in the future. I am particularly interested in “historical biogeography,” which attempts to reconstruct the history of species migrations around the planet over millions of years of evolution.

This field inspires me for three reasons.

First, biogeography gave Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace one of the first big hints that different species must be related by common ancestry — descent with modification. Basically, when these scientists traveled around the world on British sailing ships, they found that similar species were typically found near to each other, whereas similar environments had entirely different species if the regions were far apart. Furthermore, volcanic islands typically lacked many major groups, like frogs and terrestrial mammals. These observations made no sense under the then-prevailing view of “special creation” of species, but it made perfect sense if descent with modification was true.

Second, historical biogeography is an old field going back to the 1800s, with many longstanding debates, such as “dispersal versus vicariance.” Vicariance means that species spread out and are later broken up when environmental or oceanic barriers form, while dispersal means that rare, long-distance “jumping” events have occurred. However, the field is currently being revolutionized by statistical approaches, which attempt to answer these classic questions with formal statistical inference, rather than a priori decisions about what processes are most important.

Third, only by understanding the history of species' movements under past climate change can we maximize our ability to understand and predict the fate of species under human-caused climate change.

Please describe your current research.

My current research is focused on merging historical and ecological biogeography. Traditionally, these fields have been fairly isolated from each other in terms of methods and researchers. Ecological biogeographers focus on how environment and ecology control the distribution of presently living species. They often use a method called “species distribution modeling” to correlate species observations (from museums and field surveys) with climatic predictors (maps of temperature, precipitation, etc.). They typically build these models for a single species at a time.

However, we know that, often, closely related species will have similar environmental preferences. Thus, to do species distribution modeling “right,” we really should be taking into account the evolutionary relationships of species and estimating how fast species' environmental preferences evolve. Bringing in this evolutionary history means that we need to incorporate approaches from historical biogeography and phylogenetics. I expect this research will both improve distribution models of living species, as well as give us better reconstructions of the environmental preferences of ancestral species.

How does your work benefit society?

One big limitation of current species distribution models is that they tend to have poor “transferability.” They will work well fitting the training data (Editor's note: Training data is used to assess the strength and utility of a predictive relationship), but they can be quite poor when used to make predictions in new regions, new climates, or in paleo-environments in the past. Part of the problem is that the statistical methods used cannot “tell the difference” between the true environmental correlations with species presence and accidental correlations that are just due to the fact that every species lives somewhere, every local region on the earth has some limited environment, and species cannot disperse everywhere instantaneously.

Thus, including evolutionary relationships should help filter out the “noise” and provide models with better transferability. This is a crucial advantage when we try to predict what will happen to species as the climate warms.

What do you like best about your work?

I enjoy most teaching people to think about models and how to test their models. Often, people have never thought about biogeography this way, and it really is a “Free Your Mind” moment, à la The Matrix, when people get it. Sometimes, researchers don't realize how constrained they have been by the currently available methods.

Which professional accomplishment are you most proud of? / What stands out as your crowning achievement?

BioGeoBEARS is a software package that I created for the R statistical computing language. It really seems to have taken off, with dozens of researchers already using it, even though my article on the key model is still in review. I have given workshops on the method at Berkeley, the University of Tennessee, University of Texas at El Paso, Yale, and at meetings in French Guiana and Australia. Also, further back in my career, I had a few notable achievements in the science education arena, fighting the “intelligent design” creationists. See Google for that!

On the other hand, what has been your most discouraging professional moment and how did you recover? What did you learn?

I started off in grad school in a field I thought was practical but which I wasn't very interested in. At the time, I was very interested in evolution , but I didn't know anyone who worked in the field. I thought of it basically as the subject of popular books by the likes of Gould and Dawkins. I ended up getting a master's degree, which was very hard, since it felt like “giving up.” However, it was the best decision I ever made, as it lead me into science education and then into professional evolutionary biology for real.

What is the best professional advice you ever received?

Don't do a Ph.D. unless you are sure that's what your passion is! If you are exploring or unsure, do a master's program or an internship.

What is the most surprising aspect of your work?

I think the most surprising aspect of my work is that while statistical model testing is common in phylogenetics, and probabilistic biogeography models have been available for some time, no one has put these two tools together to try and answer some of the classic questions about biogeographic processes. The classic debate in biogeography is "dispersal versus vicariance" — when closely related species are separated by large barriers, does this represent long distance "jumps" across the barriers (dispersal), or does it mean that an ancestral species had a continuous range that was later broken up by the formation of the barrier (vicariance). Arguments have raged about this for decades, but with statistical model choice, I hope we can start to do objective hypothesis testing about these questions.

Who is your #1 hero and why?

The philosopher Mary Midgley, whose books taught me that evolutionary theory does not intrinsically lead to the bleak, reductionist worldview favored by certain evolution popularizers these days. When you read those sorts of popular science books, you get the impression that morality, consciousness and free will are illusions, and we are all really just robots controlled by our genes. These sorts of statements are just crude scientism motivated by a sort of tribal scientific triumphalism, rather than careful thinking. Bits of Midgley's work are problematic, but in the main, she has profound things to say about what evolution says about morality and meaning, if one makes the effort to read her books, which her critics never seem to do.

What do you do when you're not in the lab or out in the field?

I write for Panda's Thumb, a science blog devoted to topics on evolution and problems with creationist or “intelligent design” (ID) arguments . The blog, which was started in 2004 when blogs were a new thing, is named after the famous book and essay by Stephen Jay Gould. For many years it was the best source of information for critical review of the various pseudoscience arguments that the creationists push. Nowadays, all of us Panda's Thumb bloggers have grown up and become busier, and the ID movement has become much less prominent since the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial. But we occasionally still rouse ourselves to post when we see some cool evolution story or some creationist claim that needs debunking.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Like most things, mind reading comes down to the quality of your equipment.

To turn thought into action, sensors must read the brain's noisy electrical signals, and then feed them to a computer, which decodes the signals and turns them into commands. While researchers have made many helpful mind-controlled machines, most sensors in use today are imprecise.

Walt Besio, a biomedical engineer, has developed a more sensitive electrode that can conduct electricity into and out of specific brain areas. He has already used it to pinpoint areas to treat epilepsy, a brain disorder associated with abnormal electrical activity.

Now, with support from the National Science Foundation's Innovation Corps and Small Business Innovation Research programs, Besio aims to make the electrodes commercially available.

For Besio, the motivation is personal as well as professional. He pursued neural engineering when his brother was paralyzed in an accident, hoping to help develop a technology that would enable him to move again.

Name: Walt Besio           Age: It may be spring, but I'm no spring chicken. Institution: The University of Rhode Island Hometown: Kingston, R.I. Field of study: Neural engineering  

Why did you choose your field of research?

I got into this field because my brother was in an auto accident and was paralyzed from the neck down.

I wanted to do things to help him and people like him.

When I finished my bachelor's degree, I looked for companies that were working to reconnect spinal cords. There were none at the time, so I went on to grad school at the University of Miami where I did research to help cure paralysis. I've stayed with it ever since.

What was the best professional advice you ever received?

My family used to tease me that I was going to be a lifetime student because they didn't think I'd ever finish going to school. I went to school at night while I was working. It took many years.

The best professional advice came from my uncle. He said to talk with confidence. Whether you think you can do it or not, you have to convince people you can.

What are you most proud of?

My best project is seven-and-a-half years old. She consumes a lot of my time. She's an adaptive learning model. (That's my daughter.)

What was your biggest laboratory disaster, and how did you deal with it?

When I first got my faculty position, I was switching from studying the heart with my sensors to trying to study the brain. I spent nearly a year thinking I was getting brain signals. Then I realized it was just noise that looked like signals. Well, that didn't take a full year, but it did take a year to learn how to get the signals properly. That was just the worst.

What is the biggest challenge you are facing right now?

I hate to say it, but it's funding. In my position, I train students in higher education. Those students can be undergrads, grad or post docs. It costs a lot to do that.

What would surprise people most about your work?

That we can use our tripolar concentric ring electrodes to control seizures. We're able to do so non-invasively, on the scalp's surface. We've done it without using any drugs, and the seizures stopped for much longer than we expected after the stimulation.

Who is your biggest hero and why?

Lots of people have helped me along the way.

Two really come to mind. One is my uncle who gave me the advice about being confident in your abilities.

The other was my brother who was paralyzed. He made me realize how much to be thankful for. He was paralyzed for 25 years before he died. He was told he'd never be able to control anything again, that he'd always be paralyzed. But eventually we got his biceps and triceps working.

Also, my mother, who died when I was six months old. She gave up her life for me to be on this planet. She makes me appreciate being here.

What advice would you give to an aspiring engineer or scientist?

Don't give up. If you believe in something, keep trying.

Why should my [mom, kid sister, grandpa] be excited about your research?

The best is yet to come. The research that we're doing I believe — and many of my colleagues believe — will help a lot people and improve the quality of life for many people who are challenged right now.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

The computer is one of the most complex machines ever devised and most of us only ever interact with its simplest surfaces. For each keystroke and web-click, thousands of instructions must be communicated in diverse machine languages and millions of calculations computed.

Mark Hill knows more about the inner workings of computer hardware than most. As Amdahl Professor of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin, he studies the way computers transform 0s and 1s into social networks and EBay purchases, following the chain reaction from personal computer to processor to network hub to cloud and back again.

One of the main ways that Hill does this is by analyzing the performance of computer tasks. Like a coach with a stopwatch, Hill times how long it takes an ordinary processor to, say, analyze a query from Facebook or perform a web search. He's not only interested in the overall speed of the action, but how long each step in the process takes.

Through careful analysis, Hill uncovers inefficiencies, sometimes major ones, in the workflows by which computers operate and creates new solutions that make computers more powerful, more energy effective and easier to program.

Name: Mark Hill Institution: University of Wisconsin Field of Study: Computer Science

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

As climate change stresses ecosystems, already rare plant species could, sadly, go extinct. One solution is to collect plant and seed samples and house them in seed banks or botanical gardens, preserving some genetic diversity. Biologist Sean Hoban uses mathematical and computational tools to develop guidelines for ecologists and others engaged in this work. A postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, Hoban helps determine how many seeds are needed and where they should be collected to best represent a species' diversity. With collaborators in Italy, France and elsewhere, he developed software to help people plan the best preservation strategies, especially when conservation funds are scarce. Well-planned seed collections, he says, are an important tool in preserving endangered species and promoting agricultural sustainability. He was first drawn to this work through his research on the endangered butternut tree. Below, Hoban answers our ten questions.

Name: Sean Hoban Institution: National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis Field of Study: Computational biology

What is your field and why does it inspire you?

As a computational biologist, I work in several fields of life science, primarily in ecology and genetics and particularly with plants. I use simulations and statistical tools to solve problems of "big data" or answer questions about complex systems, such as will species be able to move northward as the climate warms? I especially like working in ecology, as it involves studying the linkages between living things and their environment and because it requires big-picture thinking in order to address problems of sustainability, conservation and agriculture. What inspires me is knowing that the work I do has many real-world applications.  

Please describe your current research.

My research helps to preserve endangered species and also contributes to agricultural sustainability. Specifically, some species can only be preserved outside of their natural environments, as their wild habitats are in great danger. For plants, this means collecting seeds and storing them in botanic gardens or seed banks. I use mathematical and genetic models to determine how many seeds are needed and where they should be collected from geographically, in order to best preserve a species' diversity, diversity that will be needed to adapt in the future. Well-planned seed collections can also capture valuable traits like adaptations to drought and disease, which can be helpful for crop breeding.

What is the biggest obstacle to achieving your objective(s)?

There are two big challenges: the first is to make computational or simulation models realistic enough to provide useful conservation guidance, and the second is to take the research from the lab and put it into practice. For the first challenge, genetic scientists are only just beginning to understand how to construct detailed genetic models of important traits, such as the number of genes and the amount that each gene contributes to a complex trait like drought tolerance. For the second challenge, as a mentor of mine recently said, "It's one thing to do applied research and another thing to actually apply it." There are tough obstacles to ensuring the implementation of conservation recommendations , including contacting decision makers, convincing them that the statistics and simulations have value and are realistic, understanding on-the-ground needs and limitations, finding funding for collections, and long-term planning, such as how to keep and eventually propagate the "saved seeds" into a future environment.

What do you like best about your work?

I really enjoy the tools I use — computer simulations — and the topics I study — plant conservation. For the tools, I have the opportunity to be at the cutting-edge of technology and mathematical methods, such as improving the realism of population models and the efficiency of optimization techniques. Researchers from computer science, biology and economics are collaborating on these problems. As for the topic, I've been increasingly enamored with plants over the years. How fascinating it is to learn how these mostly stationary organisms obtain nutrients, grow toward light, find a mate, produce and distribute offspring. There are a few hundred thousand plant species and they all do it a little bit differently!

What has been your most discouraging professional moment and how did you recover? What did you learn?

I'll bet that for many young scientists, the most crushing moment is after we have written our first manuscript summarizing our exciting, new findings that we spent years working on, when we read the first critical reviews from other established scientists. Scientists are pretty unsympathetic when it comes to judging the science itself. We are especially good at finding flaws, suggesting better methods, desiring more details and more data. The anonymity and online nature of how science papers are reviewed can make the message even blunter. My first rejected grant and my first rejected paper were extremely discouraging. Later I learned to put away the comments for a while, come back, and tackle them one by one. One has to be systematic and dispassionate about taking critiques, and we learn that you just have to work harder!

What is the best professional advice you ever received?

One of my advisors laid out the following stark truth for me: "Eighty percent of success is knowing the right protocol." By this, she meant: read instructions thoroughly, remember to reciprocate favors, try to understand academic politics and hierarchies, learn the strengths and weaknesses of your collaborators. In short: success lies in the details, not all of which are in the science itself and not all of which you can take care of on your own.

What is the most surprising aspect of your work?

I think everyone would be surprised at the excitement of writing computer code! Coding involves great creativity because there are many different ways one can solve a computational, statistical or data management problem. There are also many small challenges throughout each day, and solving each one is a small but fulfilling accomplishment. You also have the challenge of planning into the future, for when your code gets more complex, though you also don't know exactly how the future code will look. You must have foresight but be adaptable. The small everyday challenges as well as big design challenges make writing code very satisfying.

What exciting developments lie in the future for your field?

A really exciting area of research is discovering the connections between the microscopic scale of genetic diversity and large-scale ecosystem processes, such as decomposition and nutrient cycling. We are beginning to learn that the genetic diversity of keystone species, such as common tree species, is very important for the resistance of an ecosystem to disturbance as well as its ability to "bounce back" after disturbance. There are still few examples of direct connections from genes to the ecosystem level, but this is a whole new realm for both ecologists and geneticists.

Who is your #1 hero and why?

Charles Darwin of course! He is a hero not only for his contributions to science but also for his fascinating life story, his diligence and tenacity, the challenges he faced in bringing radical ideas to the pretty conservative scientific audience of his time, and sailing around the world! But that one is too obvious, so I will add Michael Pollan. One reason that I admire Pollan is the excitement and clarity of his book, "Botany of Desire," which is a social and natural history of four plant species. Pollan doesn't just describe the utility of plants, he explores how humans and plants have changed each other, especially how plants changed society. His way of teaching botany, history, cuisine, and evolutionary relationships is exciting, and I hope that my own writing and teaching can someday be equally compelling.

What do you do when you're not in the lab or out in the field?

I cook! It is a great de-stress activity, a way to use my hands, be creative, stop looking at screens, and take a break from the very intellectually demanding and pretty competitive world of science. I learned a lot about a food-oriented life while living in France and Italy, and now I find great joy in cooking for others or teaching them the techniques I've learned. So I'm often trying new recipes, and I blog about my successful ones.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

By some accounts, communication through social media and the Internet played a key role in organizing the Arab Spring of early 2011. Authoritarian rulers in Egypt, Libya, and Syria considered the technology so empowering to protestors, they shut down their Internets completely. In some countries, Internet users were arrested or even killed. Repressive regimes around the world still block some or all public Internet use.

Computer scientist and Internet rights advocate Roger Dingledine has spent his own career trying to change that. As a grad student at MIT, he and his coworkers developed an early anonymity system for Internet communications, which became the forerunner of what he now calls "Tor," or, The Onion Router. Onion is a metaphor for the system's many encryption layers that protect a user's identity. Tor directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, network consisting of more than 5,000 volunteer relays to conceal a user's location or usage from network surveillance or traffic analysis.

While evil doers have used Tor to carry out illicit activities anonymously, the system, first developed for the U.S. Navy, is really for the good guys, Dingledine says. Individuals at risk of reprisal (or worse) use Tor to keep websites from tracking them and to connect to news sites or instant messaging services. Journalists use it to communicate with whistleblowers and dissidents. The military and law enforcement have used Tor to keep from being detected by enemies or criminals.

These days, Dingledine spends most of his time managing the vast Tor network by way of email. Still, he says, "Every time I hear from a user saying, 'I'm in Syria and my family is not dead because I'm using your tool' … that's a great reason to keep working on it."

Tor was awarded the Free Software Foundation's 2010 Award for Projects of Social Benefit, saying it has "enabled roughly 36 million people around the world to experience freedom of access and expression on the Internet while keeping them in control of their privacy and anonymity."

Currently president and director of The Tor Project, Dingledine received bachelor's degrees in mathematics and computer science from MIT, as well as a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the same institution. In 2000, he interned at the National Security Agency, where he advised the government about Internet anonymity systems. He is project leader for both the Simple End-User Linux projects and the Free Haven projects. He is also the Security Philosopher for Reputation Technologies, Inc. In 2006, MIT's Technology Review magazine cited Dingledine as one of the top 35 innovators under the age of 35.

Below, he answers our 10 questions.

Name: Roger Dingledine Institution: Tor Project, Walpole, MA Field of Study: cybersecurity, anonymity

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

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This ScienceLives article was provided to Live Science in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

As a child, Wanda Eugene's mischievous scientific curiosity might have landed her a few "timeouts." But as an adult her multi-disciplinary scientific interests have helped her earn prestigious degrees — specifically, a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Florida State University, two master's degrees, and a Ph.D. in computer science and software engineering from Auburn University in 2011.

While working towards her doctorate, Eugene conducted research in the Human Centered Computing Lab in the Computer Science and Software Engineering Department at Auburn University — focusing on how cultural, social and personal surroundings affect how people acquire computer skills.

This training has helped Eugene design technology interfaces that can be adapted to a user's knowledge and surroundings. For example, Eugene's dissertation, Culture Based Computing for Adult Learners, incorporated cultural norms into the design of a computing system that was easier for adult learners to understand. "I look at people's everyday needs and the way they interact with things in their lives," she says. "How do we build that into computing so that it meets them where they are?"

In addition, in 2010, Eugene was an NSF East Asia and Pacific Summer Institute Fellow. While abroad, she helped to apply cultural computing to the lifestyles of Australian aborigines. [Computer Scientists Bring Digital World to Bronx Kids ]

Although Eugene now considers herself a "proud, goofy geek," her first love had been the theater. Therefore, Eugene surprised many people who knew her by pursuing a career in computer science. For Eugene, however, being a computer scientist is not much different from working in the theater. "It is a different way to use creativity," she explains.

Wanda believes that being a computer scientist is akin to being a detective chasing down Carmen Sandiego, the popular computer game villain. To find out why she thinks so, watch the accompanying video.

Name: Wanda Eugene Institution: Florida State University Field of Study: computer science

Editor's Note:The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Having children forced Professor Donna Ginther to better focus on her work and to budget time wisely. It also gave the University of Kansas economics researcher first-hand experience with being a mother in a rigorous, mostly male, academic environment. Because she had a vested interest, Ginther began to study the gender makeup of U.S. research scientists to better understand the barriers women face in training for and staying in research careers.

All things being equal, hiring and pay of Ph.D. scientists should be regulated by free market forces, according to Ginther. Equally productive workers should be hired and paid the same regardless of, say, gender or race. But employment surveys of academic researchers have long revealed a paucity of women and racial minorities among their ranks, particularly at senior levels, indicating something else is at play.

In search of an explanation for these trends, Ginther found herself sorting through disparate sets of data that seemed impossible to link or combine to reveal the big picture. In 2004, a month after her first child was born, she began a campaign to standardize information on these issues so that it could be shared and explored, and to match U.S. patent and publication records to doctoral employment data from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Survey of Doctorate Recipients. These data have given researchers better tools to address important research and policy questions about participation in the science and technology enterprise.

"Data are king," she says. "When we're not able to efficiently share scientific data, it impedes our understanding of the determinants of economic growth, technological advancement and all kinds of societal benefits."

For its part, NSF's National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics has been working to create the linked database, despite several confidentiality and proprietary challenges. The updated database will allow Ginther to shine a brighter light on what roles gender, race and ethnicity play in academic career advancement, and give social scientists a more fine-grained picture of U.S. innovation and entrepreneurship.

Ginther's career path has been anything but direct. Her interests have taken her all over the country (sometimes on the back of a motorcycle), from Atlanta to Seattle and the Midwest. After receiving her doctorate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ginther held academic positions at Southern Methodist University and the University of Washington. She is currently director of the Center for Science Technology and Economic Policy at KU, where she chairs the Faculty Compensation Committee, and has created and implemented policies for faculty engaged in family caregiving responsibilities.

Name: Donna K. Ginther Institution: University of Kansas, Lawrence Field of Study: Labor economics, workforce demographics

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Kira Barton sweats the small stuff. A mechanical engineer at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Barton works on next-generation manufacturing processes — at the smaller-than-tiny scale.

Her research supports the manufacture of everything from high-resolution, DNA-detecting sensors to sophisticated robots. It is part of a national effort in advanced manufacturing to develop new technologies that will dramatically reduce the time required to design, build and test goods. Those advances are already happening. The screen right in front of you, for example, was made with the type of meticulously developed techniques Barton and others in the advanced manufacturing field make possible.

Below, Barton talks about her life and work as a researcher.

Name: Kira Barton Age: 35 Institution: University of Michigan Hometown: Silverthorne, Colorado (original); Ann Arbor, Michigan (current) Field of study: Mechanical engineering

Why did you choose your field of research?

I'd always been leaning toward math and science, and into building things with my hands. In graduate school I was fortunate to work in a National Science Foundation (NSF)-sponsored center at the University of Illinois (Nano-CEMMS), where I got to work on a diverse team with a range of backgrounds.

I learned about all the cool, new things being developed. For example, technology that can print with electronic or biologic materials, creating flexible electronics or sensors at the micro and nano-scales.

What was the best professional advice you ever received?

To go and find things you can really be passionate about. When you find areas that are exciting and the work and people are interesting, it doesn't feel like work. It's fun. My PhD advisor gave me that advice.

What are you most proud of?

Right now, I'm most proud when I see the accomplishments of the next generation. When you see a student's light bulb go off or spark of curiosity in labs and classrooms, it's a really good feeling.

What was your biggest laboratory disaster, and how did you deal with it?

Any time you have a person interested in your work come to visit, that's when everything suddenly stops working. It's almost as if there is a scientific law stating that the moment when you need something to work, that's when it fails.

For example, we had a big site visit at an NSF center with lots of important people. We spent weeks preparing. The first run out, our demonstration breaks. But that's when you keep your cool and say, "This is how research works. Let me show you what we meant to have happen."

You have to anticipate moments like that because they occur all the time.

What is the biggest challenge you are facing right now?

Given the economic climate, funding is always a challenge. The biggest challenge is finding the right resources to keep your lab running — to support the students in your lab to focus on research that needs to be done.

What would surprise people most about your work?

People have a preconceived idea of what manufacturing is. But if you look at my work, you would be surprised at the diversity of research topics within manufacturing. There are biologists, chemists, materials scientists — all sorts of people with different expertise and backgrounds.

From my perspective, manufacturing is becoming more high-value, where we're looking at coming up with completely new technologies and products. New ways of pushing the envelope.

By high-value, I mean lighter materials, improved functionality, essentially finding ways to enable capabilities people want.

One example would be flexible electronics, like last year's electronic circuit printed into a DIY tattoo that measures heart rate and temperature. Ideas that completely change your idea of what it means to have a sensor hooked up to you. That has advantages for kids; they won't pull the sensor off. You can put it into a blanket or clothing. Yet, you still collect data. I think you're going to see a lot more, from cell phones to sensors printed into clothing.

Who is your biggest hero and why?

My sister. My older sister is a scientist, a professor in biology. Her passion for what she does really has inspired me throughout my life.

What advice would you give to an aspiring engineer or scientist?

To be curious. Be curious about what topics or areas you find of interest, and encourage and develop that curiosity. That's what drives science: to seek knowledge, to ask the question and go that next step.

Have you ever been surprised by the results of an experiment?

Yes, of course. One time I was a grad student working on a printing process that was relatively new. It was a relatively slow process to ensure consistency. We made a small modification and it made three to four orders of magnitude difference. That level of improvement was surprising. And it surprised everyone because it was relatively straightforward. That was a reminder you don't always need big complicated solutions to have big fixes.

Why should my [mom, kid sister, grandpa] be excited about your research?

Manufacturing is part of everything. All products we have on a daily basis come from manufacturing. That ability to design, to create a new concept, then go and make it, is engineering and manufacturing. And it's fun.

I can see that in my two-year-old daughter. I watch her get excited when she builds or creates something.

And that's what we do. We build. We create. You sit down in your house and everything in your house was designed and manufactured to do what you want.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

For Andrea Johnson, the heart of computer science is not programs or gadgets, but people. People shouldn't have to adapt their lifestyles to technology, she says. Instead, technology should be designed around users' lives and needs. This principle underlies Johnson's work on Prime III, an electronic voting system designed to be accessible to all voters.

Current voting technologies pose barriers to many people with disabilities. For example, voting systems lack audio communication tools for people who are blind. Prime III solves this problem through multimodal technologies—speech to text, or text to speech and touch. The goal is to enable people with special needs to vote independently and in private. Johnson's role has focused on plain language in voting materials.

The project is part of Clemson University's Human Centered Computing Lab.

Johnson received her bachelor's degree in computer science with a minor in mathematics from Spelman College, and her masters in computer science from Auburn University. She is a member of the Upsilon Pi Epsilon International Honor Society for the computing sciences. She also is passionate about finding ways to facilitate STEM learning in women and minority groups, and hopes to one day create an organization dedicated to STEM advancement among underrepresented groups.

Below, Johnson answers our 10 questions.

Name: Andrea Johnson Institution: Clemson University Field of Study: Computer Science

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Evolutionary biologists seek to resolve the tensions between the evolution and maintenance of cooperative behavior in animals and animals' need to behave "selfishly" to survive. Keenan Mack, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, builds mathematical models to analyze the conditions under which cooperation can evolve. He specifically focuses on how the need to make efficient use of resources might be a basis for cooperation.

Read more about Keenan's research.

Name: Keenan M. L. Mack Age: 32 Institution: National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis Hometown: Needham, IN Field of Study: Evolutionary ecology

What inspired you to choose this field of study?

I've wanted to be a scientist as long as I can remember; I mean, what kid didn't want to be a paleontologist? … It was really the elegance of evolution as an explanation of the diversity of life that drew me in initially. It just felt like such an important idea that I felt compelled to learn as much as I could about it.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received?

The idea that unless you can effectively explain something to someone, you really don't know it yourself.

What was your first scientific experiment as a child?

I suppose the one that is seared (pun intended) into my memory would be when I was very young … my house was heated with an old cast-iron potbelly stove. I reached out to touch the wall of it, but I didn't know there had been a fire in it very recently, so my mom warned me not to touch the stove because it was hot. Well, I could see that there wasn't a fire going inside it at the moment, so I decided to test her hypothesis, which was promptly confirmed.

What is your favorite thing about being a scientist or researcher?

Definitely my favorite thing about being a scientist is the freedom to pursue new knowledge. Being the first to know something is an incredible feeling.

What is the most important characteristic a scientist must demonstrate in order to be an effective scientist?

I would say the courage to admit they were wrong, even after investing years of work.

What are the societal benefits of your research?

My research helps explain human nature, and provides warnings about how that nature might change in a global society.

Who has had the most influence on your thinking as a researcher?

Probably Jen Rudgers. After I graduated from undergrad, I was sort of lost trying to figure out what to do next. Jen was a post-doc at Indiana University before I was accepted into the grad program there. She's now an associate professor at the University of New Mexico. I worked as a research assistant for her for a little over a year, and during that time she basically taught me how to be a scientist, everything from manuscript writing to experimental design. Without her guidance I never would have gotten the experience I needed to be accepted into graduate school.

What about your field or being a scientist do you think would surprise people first?

Likely, how much of the job requires more writing and math skills than knowing facts about nature.

If you could only rescue one thing from your burning office, what would it be?

I'd grab my portable back-up hard drive, but it would be tough leaving my chess set.

What music do you play most often in your office or car?

In the office I prefer stuff without lyrics, so depending on my mood anything from Budos Band to Tchaikovsky. In the car I like stuff like Phish, Sam Roberts, and The Whitest Boy Alive.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

When the climate changes a species' habitat, the species must track the moving habitat, adapt to the new climate or become extinct. Ongoing changes in climate are currently causing habitat loss and distribution shifts that could result in mass extinction. Because of these trends, wildlife species from the short-tailed chinchilla to the American pika are at risk.

A. Michelle Lawing — a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis — uses evolutionary biology methods and models combined with evidence from the fossil record to study the responses of species and communities to environmental change over time. Lawing has determined that geographical shifts in rattlesnake populations over the past 320,000 years were not due to evolutionary change, but rather to the rattlesnake's habitat tracking. Her models also indicate that many species will have to move both farther and faster than they have in the past to avoid extinction.

Lawing is expanding her research to cover vertebrates in North America, using mathematical models with a number of evolutionary variables to predict geographical shifts in species distribution, as well as to identify traits that are more sensitive or resistant to climate fluctuations.

You can read more about Lawing's research here.

Name: Michelle Lawing Age: 30 Institution: National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis Hometown: Rockport, TX Field of Study: Paleobiology

What inspired you to choose this field of study?

As an undergraduate, I was inspired to pursue research in biology when I met evolutionary biologists studying the ecology, morphology (the form and structure of organisms) and systematics(the diversification of organisms and the relationships among them through time) of rattlesnakes. Shortly after, I was fortunate enough to tag along on field expeditions to collect rattlesnakes in the deserts of United States and Mexico. Spending time discussing research with these scientists, I realized being a researcher was the type of career I wanted to develop. After many years of development as a researcher, I came to understand the importance of geological time and highly dimensional systems (morphological shapes and climatic niches, or range of climatic conditions an organism is found in) in evolutionary and ecological processes. Now I study the influence of past climate change on these processes, and I apply mathematical models to study these processes in highly dimensional systems.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received?

Doing research, one often feels rushed to finish the experiments, analyze the results or write the paper. The best advice I received was to take my time. It is important to make sure to check and double check your work and your conclusions.

What was your first scientific experiment as a child?

My first scientific experiment was one of product testing: which soap produced the most suds. Treatments included the amount of lathering time and amount of water.

What is your favorite thing about being a scientist or researcher?

I enjoy the act of discovery. Specifically, I like to identify new patterns and build models that fit patterns to discover what biological processes are involved.

What is the most important characteristic a scientist must demonstrate in order to be an effective scientist?

I think this is highly variable depending on the scientist. For me, it is organization. Being organized allows me to keep pace with the many aspects of being a researcher, including data collection, data analysis, communicating results and conclusions, publishing, collaborations, teaching and giving presentations.

What are the societal benefits of your research?

Understanding how species responded geographically and evolutionarily to climate change in the past will allow us to make informed decisions on how to help them cope with impending climate change.

Who has had the most influence on your thinking as a researcher?

My dissertation advisor, Dr. P. David Polly, had the most influence on my thinking as a researcher. He is a vertebrate paleontologist who studies how the history of the Earth has affected the evolution and ecology of vertebrates. Dr. Polly provided a stimulating and flexible academic environment. He has a particularly keen perception, understanding, and ability to communicate quantitative problems in paleontology, biology and geology.

What about your field or being a scientist do you think would surprise people first?

My field has a strongly computational aspect to it. When people think of paleontology or paleobiology, they think of scientists digging in sand and rocks for fossil discoveries. I make discoveries on my computer with open access data compiled from online resources.

What music do you play most often in your office or car?

I always tune my radio station to National Public Radio (NPR).

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

New methods in phylogenetics — the study of the evolutionary relationships among species through time, i.e., the Tree of Life — now allow scientists to build extremely large phylogenetic trees for tens of thousands of species and help to illustrate the vast biodiversity on Earth. Evolutionary biologist Jeremy Beaulieu, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, applies large phylogenies (evolutionary histories) to various comparative data to better understand broad patterns of evolutionary development across flowering plants. Most recently, he has been developing new approaches to the construction of large phylogenetic trees and new comparative methods to gain insights into the evolution of campanulids, a large flowering plant group comprised of some 35,000 species.

You can read more about Jeremy's research here.

Name: Jeremy Beaulieu Age: 32 Institution:National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis Hometown: Sacramento, CA Field of Study: Macroevolution and comparative biology

What inspired you to choose this field of study?

I was inspired by Joe Felsenstein's 1985 paper on why genealogical relationships (i.e., phylogeny) matter in any statistical analysis. It was the first time I saw the application of the evolutionary process in understanding patterns observed among species.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received?

My master's thesis advisor said to me once that a project is never done until you see the page proofs. Given that publications are currency in science these days, I think this is sage advice.

What was your first scientific experiment as a child?

I got a chemistry set for my birthday or Christmas or something. My first experiment involved mixing all the various solutions together, putting the concoction in my closet, and waiting for it to spontaneously generate some sort of weird creature. It didn't, of course.

What is your favorite thing about being a scientist or researcher?

The freedom to think about, and pursue, answers to questions that I think are interesting. I'm not sure there are many professions that are like this.

What is the most important characteristic a scientist must demonstrate in order to be an effective scientist?

There is no question that, in order to be effective, you need to be positive. And that doesn't just apply to your work, but the work of others as well.

Who has had the most influence on your thinking as a researcher?

I would have to say my Ph.D advisor Michael Donoghue – and not because I'm hoping for an amazing letter of recommendation from him someday! I was fan of his even before I chose to work in his lab. He has made a career on thinking about large problems in new and interesting ways and I always strive to do the same.

What about your field or being a scientist do you think would surprise people first?

This is a tough question, I think. In regards to my field, I think people would be surprised by the wealth of knowledge about individual species (i.e., trait measurements, DNA sequences, geographic range information, etc.) that has accumulated over the last few decades. Of course, the second thing that would surprise people is how little we have put this information to good use.

If you could only rescue one thing from your burning office, what would it be?

My MacBook Pro. I'm terrible about backing things up, so if my computer goes, I'm in serious trouble.

What music do you play most often in your office or car?

This is another tough question. I have a rather eclectic taste in music — from classical to reggae to rock n' roll — I like it all.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Most people rely on computers for varied technical tasks such as transmitting messages, spellchecking documents and videoconferencing, without even considering the possibility that these machines might be able to help them sort through their emotions.

But, increasingly unconstrained by the limits of their lifeless, emotionless construction, computers are being used more and more to improve our understanding of human emotions. This trend is due, in part, to the work of Shaundra Daily, who — for most of her career — has been helping to advance a field called affective computing. Affective computing involves developing computer technologies that can be used to help recognize, process and stimulate human emotions.

Daily, who is assistant professor in Clemson University's school of computing and director of its Interpersonal Technology Lab, was first introduced to affective computing while she was a part of MIT's Media Lab doctoral program. Daily told PBS that for her, affective computing involves creating different learning environments so that children can learn about their emotions and the emotions of others, discuss these emotions and use their resulting knowledge to work effectively together in the future.

Daily helped develop Girls Involved in Real Life Sharing (G.I.R.L.S.), which allows users to create illustrated life stories that a program analyzes to help users explore emotions. She has also created the Dancing Alice project, which fuses computer science and dance: Girls use Carnegie Mellon University's Alice software to create virtual dance partners, practice and perform. 

Daily is also involved in the Institute for African American Mentoring in Computer Science (iAAMCS, pronounced "I am cs"), which seeks to increase the number of African American computer science doctorates. The National Science Foundation awarded Daily and Juan Gilbert, Presidential Endowed Professor and chairman of the Human-Centered Computing Division at Clemson, a $5 million grant to launch the Institute. 

Learn more about Daily and her work in the Science Lives video below.

Name: Shaundra Daily Institution: Clemson University Field of Study: Affective Computing

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Not everything we wish to know in biology can be measured directly, either because doing so is too costly or simply impossible. In some cases, scientists can look to biological "signposts," called biomarkers, to infer information. Medical practitioners, for example, can use the presence of certain molecules in blood or tissue to diagnose or predict disease. The proteins known as antibodies are examples of biomarkers indicating possible infection.

Chris Remien, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, uses math to better understand how biological markers relate to the diets of animals and how they metabolize nutrients and toxins. The food and water animals consume leave chemical signatures (biomarkers) in their tissues; however, metabolism sometimes alters these signatures. Remien develops mathematical models to understand how metabolism can change the biomarkers.

Remien's models also help doctors estimate the extent of liver damage following overdose of acetaminophen (the active ingredient in some pain medicines), which is crucial for determining patient survival.

You can read more about Remien's research here. Below, he answers our 10 questions.

Name: Chris Remien Age: 30 Institution: National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis Hometown: Ishpeming, Mich. Field of Study: Mathematical biology

What inspired you to choose this field of study?

I have always enjoyed problem solving, which is what initially drew me to mathematics. Over time, I became more drawn to problems rooted in the real world, in data. Biology asks perhaps the biggest and most exciting questions of the real world, those related to life. The complexity of life means that intuition alone is often not enough and mathematics and simulation can sometimes come to the rescue. It is an exciting time to be a quantitative person asking biological questions.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received?

Trust your gut. A huge part of the art of modeling is simply figuring out exactly what to model, what is important to the question at hand. For the best problems, you have a deep feeling that more information can be uncovered through modeling, even if you don't yet see exactly how it should be done.

What was your first scientific experiment as a child?

I spent a lot of time playing outside as a child, which led me to wonder why things were as they were. Why do these trees grow here, and others grow elsewhere? We would catch tadpoles, put them in our backyard pond, and watch them turn into frogs. Spending time outside has led to a fascination with the natural world that continues to this day.

What is your favorite thing about being a scientist or researcher?

I love how mathematics allows us to see the unseeable. If we are clever enough, mathematical models can be used to gain information on things that are impossible to measure directly, which is very exciting. I have been fortunate to work with a range of people, from ecologists to medical doctors, asking very different questions. Mathematics highlights similarities between them.

What is the most important characteristic a scientist must demonstrate in order to be an effective scientist?

Creativity. The most interesting questions require completely novel approaches. The most creative people are usually the ones driving a field in new and exciting directions.

What are the societal benefits of your research?

Research on stable isotope ratios has already seen a number of interesting results. In one case, understanding the stable isotope ratios of hair led to the identification of a murder victim by determining her travel history. It turns out that stable isotope ratios of oxygen and hydrogen in water vary with geography on a continental scale, and so because the stable isotope ratios in drinking water get incorporated into hair, a record of travel history is revealed by looking at the isotope composition of scalp hair.

Another example of the usefulness of stable isotope ratios can be found in the tropics where woody plants and grasses, which use different types of photosynthesis, have very different carbon isotope ratios. We have used stable isotopes to quantify African elephant diet over time as it relates to rainfall history, which is useful information for elephant conservation. Typically, after rainfall, grasses become more abundant and constitute a greater portion of an elephant's diet. Using carbon isotopes in hair, we can see exactly how much grass these animals are eating and how their diet changes with changes in rainfall.

Similarly, we have used carbon isotopes in fossil soils to determine the fraction of woody cover sites that bear hominin fossils, a problem that has implications for the history of our species. Because woody plants and grasses have very different carbon isotope ratios, there is a strong relationship between carbon isotope ratios of soil and fraction of woody cover.

In other research, my work on acetaminophen overdose will hopefully have a direct impact in how medical doctors view acetaminophen overdose patients. Our modeling efforts offer insight into the nature of the dynamics of an overdose and hopefully will be able to better guide physicians in determining whether a patient will require a liver transplant for survival.

Who has had the most influence on your thinking as a researcher?

I am greatly indebted to my graduate school mentors Fred Adler and Thure Cerling, who taught me the art of creative problem solving.

What about your field or being a scientist do you think would surprise people first?

I think it's not often appreciated that mathematical modeling is an art. A good model is predictive and useful, but also offers insight into the underlying processes.

If you could only rescue one thing from your burning office, what would it be?

My trusty Macbook and a full cup of coffee.

What music do you play most often in your office or car?

Anything from Modest Mouse to Johnny Cash to classical, depending on the mood of the day.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

To Arik Kershenbaum, the squeaks and whistles of dolphins and whales hold more than just a charming fascination, they could unlock the mysteries of how language evolves.

A postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, Kershenbaum uses mathematical techniques drawn from genetic analysis to examine how syntax in animal communication relates to behavior. Questions he is exploring include whether a dolphin learns vocalization patterns from other dolphins and what information about their surroundings the animals can put into their calls.

Kershenbaum, who previously developed signal processing algorithms for the aerospace industry in Israel, is applying techniques he first used in studying the vocalization patterns of the rock hyrax, a small mammal that lives in the Middle East and Africa.

Name: Arik Kershenbaum Age: 47 Institution: National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis Hometown: Yuvalim, in the Galilee of Israel Field of Study: Animal vocal communication

What inspired you to choose this field of study?

When I was little, I wanted to be a rocket scientist and a zoologist. What could be more exciting than talking to animals and investigating outer space? When I grew up, I spent 10 years working as a rocket scientist, and then changed fields so I could realize my second childhood dream. Childhood dreams are important — and it seems that you can make them come true if you really want.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received?

"I dare do all that may become a man, Who dares do more, is none"

What was your first scientific experiment as a child?

I don't exactly remember what the aim of it was, but I think it had something to do with pouring acid all over the garden and causing untold damage.

What is your favorite thing about being a scientist or researcher?

There's that feeling that you're working on the "real thing." You're not learning from textbooks like in school or listening to lectures like in university. You're doing things no one has done before and finding out stuff no one else has ever known.

What is the most important characteristic a scientist must demonstrate in order to be an effective scientist?

Without a doubt, a deep fascination and desire to understand that little corner of the universe that you're investigating. Being brainy doesn't even matter that much. Most of us can be world experts at that one thing that really interests us.

What are the societal benefits of your research?

I never like to answer this question. I could say, "By understanding animal communication, we will understand the evolution of human language and maybe find a cure for autism." But that's not the right answer to give. The answer is that all knowledge benefits society. It may not give us more health, or money, or technical gadgets (today ... tomorrow it might ...), but it helps to fulfill us as human beings. Carl Sagan said, "An extraterrestrial being, scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, movies, etc, might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity and consumerism. What kind of society could we create if, instead, we drummed into them science and a sense of hope?" I don't think that we need any more reason to do science than that.

Who has had the most influence on your thinking as a researcher?

Probably Ron Lockley. "Who?" you ask. He was an English naturalist who wrote a fantastic book called, The Private Life of the Rabbit. This book inspired Richard Adams to write Watership Down, which was my favorite story as a child. In my first year at university, I found Lockley's book in a small book shop and was astounded how he used simple and careful observations of wild rabbit behavior, which lead to such a rich and profound understanding of their social relationships. I felt that it opened a window for me onto a different world and I've wanted to explore that world ever since.

What about your field or being a scientist do you think would surprise people first?

Half the people I meet are surprised that I do most of my work in front of a computer, without meeting a single animal. The other half see pictures of me putting radio collars on rock hyraxes, and are surprised that I actually pick these animals up. Sometimes it's the same people surprised at both ...

If you could only rescue one thing from your burning office, what would it be?

Let it burn. Knowledge, once uncovered, cannot be unlearned. Plus, I have everything backed up on the cloud. ;-)

What music do you play most often in your office or car?

I listen to everything from Mozart to the Sex Pistols, and plenty of R&B in between, but never when working. Perhaps because my work has too much in common with "music" in the widest sense — it only confuses me to hear human compositions when I'm trying to understand animal ones.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Becoming a computer scientist isn' t part of most people' s retirement plans, but that' s exactly what Cedric Stallworth did after retiring from professional football.

After receiving his Bachelor of Science degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Stallworth was drafted into the National Football League (NFL) by the Green Bay Packers. An injury before the start of the season, however, kept him from playing in the NFL. After recovering, Stallworth went on to play football professionally in Europe and Canada for two years as part of the World League of American Football. Following this, Stallworth returned to academics, earning a master' s degree from his alma mater.

To those who are surprised to learn that a person of his physique is a computer scientist, Stallworth says, "They don' t understand what a computer scientist is." A computer scientist, Stallworth explains, is not someone who eats hot pockets all day or lives in his mother' s basement. Computer science is "sexy" for Stallworth. "It' s a medium that is not only expressive, but it' s impactful as well."

In his current role as assistant dean for outreach in the College of Computing, Stallworth tries to teach students to view computing as a way to realize innovation and creativity. He also helps develop liaisons with local schools to encourage women to come to Georgia Tech for computer science at the graduate level. Additionally, Stallworth has partnered with various women' s colleges to help create their computer science programs.

Student reviews of Stallworth say such things as, "You will not find a better CS professor than him," and that he is a "must have" teacher.

Learn more about this ball player turned computer scientist by watching the video below.

Name:Cedric Stallworth Institution: Georgia Tech Field of Study: Computer Science

Editor' s Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

The curiously clannish behavior of the spotted hyena sparked the interest of Amiyaal Ilany — who grew up surrounded by animals his zoologist father brought home to study. Later, the hyena's social behavior would inspire Ilany's research into individual roles in social networks.

Ilany is a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, where he investigates the forces that affect changes in social networks. These could be forces such as seasonal change and prey availability, internal rules of network structure, and traits of the clan members. The spotted hyena provides a multitude of data points for Ilany's research, as the animal has the most complex and hierarchical social structure of any carnivore, with clans of up to 100 hyenas led by a single alpha female.

Ilany explores what character traits allow an individual to hold a key role in its social network and whether these traits improve an individual's ability to survive and reproduce. Results of his research may enhance understanding of human social life, shine new light on the evolution of society, and improve our understanding of the lives of other social animals.

Name: Amiyaal Ilany Age: 38 Hometown: Sapir, Israel Field of Study: Behavioral Ecology

What inspired you to choose this field of study?

My father was a zoologist, and our house and backyard were always full of animals, including peacocks, foxes and even a leopard. I was always interested in their behavior.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received?

My father taught me to be patient when observing animals. It always pays off. I was able to record some rare behaviors by staying in the same place and keeping my eye in the telescope.

What was your first scientific experiment as a child?

I tested if our gazelles in the backyard were afraid of a stuffed leopard. I then did a control, using just a piece of cloth.

What is your favorite thing about being a scientist or researcher?

The freedom to ask questions and allocate time and resources to answer them.

What is the most important characteristic a scientist must demonstrate in order to be an effective scientist?

Being innovative. Science is all about new ideas (and the ability to test them).

What are the societal benefits of your research?

I study animal social networks, and I believe they can tell us a lot about our own society. Animal sociality is similar to ours, while simpler to objectively quantify.

Who has had the most influence on your thinking as a researcher?

Professor Amotz Zahavi, who first hypothesized the handicap principle, which suggests that reliable signals must be costly to the signaler, and thus individuals that cannot afford the cost of the signal cannot use it. The classic example is the peacock tail, which makes the peacock more vulnerable to predators, and thus only high-quality males can afford to carry a large tail. I tend to view the world through this principle.

What about your field or being a scientist do you think would surprise people first?

People are always surprised to learn how similar animals are to us.

If you could only rescue one thing from your burning office, what would it be?

My laptop, of course.

What music do you play most often in your office or car?

It varies, but mostly Israeli rock.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation

Storm surges from rising sea levels are important predicted consequences of global climate change and have the potential for severe effects on the vegetation of low-lying coastal areas. The unprecedented storm surge from Hurricane Sandy, for example, was enough to shift coastal shorelines along New York and New Jersey. The question of how these storm surges affect coastal areas can be addressed mathematically and is the focus of research by Dr. Jiang Jiang, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS).

[Read more about Jiang's research]

Name: Jiang Jiang Age: 30 Institution: National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis Hometown: Wenzhou, China Field of Study: Theoretical Ecology, Wetlands, Climate change

What inspired you to choose this field of study?

I am interested in trying to understand our nature, especially ecosystem processes that involve species interacting with environments. Mathematical tools are my favorite approaches to understanding these complex interactions.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received?

I forget when my father first told me to be consistent in doing what I choose. But his advice helped me choose my major, go to graduate school and do research. Doing research is lots of fun when you find something new, but you can easily get stuck on something in the middle of research, which can be really frustrating. His advice helped me calm down and be confident.

What was your first scientific experiment as a child?

I rebuilt a radio using electronic parts.

What is your favorite thing about being a scientist or researcher?

I like to do simulation experiments on crazy ideas. Using mathematical and computational approaches, I can set up hypothesized rules for the interactions of species. This is sort of like creating virtual nature.

What is the most important characteristic a scientist must demonstrate in order to be an effective scientist?

Scientists don't replicate previous work. An effective scientist should apply critical thinking of past research. Then you might come up with innovative ideas.

What are the societal benefits of your research?

Understanding our ecosystem processes can help restoration. For example, my research on the interaction processes of coastal vegetation and underlying groundwater salinity dynamics can provide tools for management. The model can predict habitat change of the coastal Everglades for given scenarios of sea level rise or storm surge. The scenarios assume salinity changes of groundwater, therefore changing vegetation through ecological-hydrologic processes. The model can also help in making assessments of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan, which aims to capture fresh water that now flows unused to the ocean and the gulf and redirects it to Everglades.

Who has had the most influence on your thinking as a researcher?

My middle school science teacher taught me not only science knowledge but also stories on how people become scientist, for example Newton, Darwin and Hawking. I started to read their stories and wanted to be a scientist too.

What about your field or being a scientist do you think would surprise people first?

People are familiar with damage caused by hurricanes. One major cause of hurricane damage is storm surge, which causes significant flooding and costs people their lives if they're caught unexpected. However, storm surge can also have large long-term impacts, not just short-term damage. My research shows that storm surge can carry saltwater so far inland that it can alter groundwater salinity, known as salt intrusion, and can damage agriculture. Excessive saltwater could also cause vegetation shift from freshwater vegetation to salt-tolerant plants.

If you could only rescue one thing from your burning office, what would it be?

My computer.

What music do you play most often in your office or car?

Random music.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Cyntrica Eaton is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Norfolk State University in Virginia. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of several publications, including A Framework for Detecting and Diagnosing Configuration Faults in Web Applications and Advances in Web Testing. Below, she answers our 10 questions about her life and work as a scientist.

Name: Cyntrica Eaton Institution: Norfolk University Field of Study: Computer Science

Questions:

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Animals regularly move nutrients between ecosystems. Bats, for example, often forage far from where they roost, and in doing so, they bring nutrients from streams and agricultural areas to their roost. These are known as spatial subsidies, as these nutrients, and in some cases, contaminants move from one ecosystem to another.

The question is, what are the positive and negative effects of spatial subsidies? Julia Earl, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, is investigating this question via mathematics. Earl uses differential equations and builds dynamic mathematical models to make predictions about how subsidies might affect ecosystems over space and time.

Part of Earl's research involves examining frogs and salamanders after metamorphosis, as they move across terrestrial habitats. Juvenile frogs and salamanders move from ponds to surrounding terrestrial landscapes and themselves become nutrient and energy subsidies. The amphibians have a high mortality rate in the juvenile stage, becoming prey or drying out in the water-limiting terrestrial environment. Earl hypothesizes that the salamanders, which don't travel as far as the frogs, will likely affect a relatively small area but have more concentrated effects, while the frogs will affect a larger area and have less concentrated effects.

Earl hopes that her research will determine general patterns of subsidy distribution and help inform conservation and wildlife management efforts.

[Read more about Earl's research]

Name: Julia E. Earl Institution:National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis Age: 30 Field of Study: Ecology, Conservation Biology, Herpetology (study of amphibians and reptiles)

What inspired you to choose this field of study?

All my time was spent outside as a kid. Growing up in North Carolina, I spent my summers in the Appalachian Mountains and at the beach. I would go on walks outside and loved seeing interesting plants and animals. As I got older, I learned more about habitat destruction and read books about deformed frogs and declining amphibians. I discovered that I really wanted to help people and the environment coexist.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received?

You can achieve whatever you want as long as you work hard and ask for help when you need it. Though, I would add that it's important to have realistic goals for achieving what you want.

What was your first scientific experiment as a child?

My third grade science fair project was to examine how oil spills affected plants. I had three plants: one got vegetable oil, one motor oil, and the third got water as a control. Strangely, the one that received vegetable oil looked the worst. I guess I was an environmental biologist just waiting to happen!

What is your favorite thing about being a scientist or researcher?

Thinking creatively. A lot of people think that scientists are very left-brained, but it takes a lot of creativity to design experiments and come up with novel solutions.

What is the most important characteristic a scientist must demonstrate in order to be an effective scientist?

Perseverance, which, in my mind, is really a combination of patience and hard work. Scientists have to recognize that mistakes or accidents happen all the time that can ruin days to months (years?) of work. It's important to have backup plans and simply not give up. It definitely pays off eventually.

What are the societal benefits of your research?

All of my work relates back to helping people and nature live together. I have done work on the effects of pollution and forestry practices on amphibians, with the goal of figuring out what impacts people are having and if there is a way to minimize these effects on wildlife and ecosystems. I'm currently studying connections between different ecosystems, which have positive effects like supporting ecosystem services (services provided by nature that help people live) and negative effects like transporting contaminants.By working to predict these, I will hopefully be able to make management recommendations to support the positives and prevent or dampen the negatives.

Who has had the most influence on your thinking as a researcher?

My graduate advisors: Ray Semlitsch at the University of Missouri and Howard Whiteman at Murray State University. They both are very open to new ways of thinking and new approaches to investigating research questions. Also, they both emphasize the need for long-term data and rigorous experimental work, which are complementary approaches. Working with them inspired me to explore new questions and try out novel methods.

What about your field or being a scientist do you think would surprise people first?

That we use so much math. People see ecologists and conservationists on TV outside catching and measuring animals, but they don't see us writing down equations or developing computer programs to help endangered species or predict where contaminants go. Both aspects are actually quite important to solving problems effectively.

If you could only rescue one thing from your burning office, what would it be?

My laptop or my purse.

What music do you play most often in your office or car?

Alternative/Indie rock. What can I say? I grew up in the 90s.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation,the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Fred Roberts is a professor of mathematics at Rutgers University and director of a center that employs data analysis to address homeland security threats. He is also director emeritus and senior advisor of an internationally renowned mathematical sciences research center established in 1989 to solve complex problems in information science and communication technology. Roberts' major research interests are in mathematical models in the social, behavioral, biological, environmental and epidemiological sciences, and in problems of communications, transportation and security. His first book, Discrete Mathematical Models, with Applications to Social, Biological and Environmental Problems, has been called a classic in the field and his books and articles cover a wide range of topics from energy modeling to mathematical psychology to biomath in the high schools.

Roberts directed the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) from 1996 to 2011. Founded as one of the original National Science Foundation Science and Technology Centers, the center grew from two academic and two industrial partners to its 15 partner organizations today with more than 325 affiliated scientists.

Under Roberts' leadership, DIMACS evolved beyond mathematics and computer science to encompass physical and life sciences, environmental sciences, social sciences, engineering, economics, agriculture and public policy. The interdisciplinary nature of the DIMACS faculty made it possible for researchers to see how mathematical solutions could be applied to problems such situations such as gene sequencing, evolutionary biology, epidemiology, sustainability, and homeland security.

In 2006, Roberts headed the first major DIMACS-hosted center to apply information science to maintaining homeland security. In 2009, he assumed his current position as director of the Command, Control and Interoperability Center for Advanced Data Analysis (CCICADA), a Department of Homeland SecurityUniversity Center of Excellence with 17 partner organizations nationwide. His research interests in this field include stadium security, container inspection at ports, sensor management for nuclear materials detection, early warning of disease outbreaks and bioterrorist events, and homeland security aspects of global environmental change.

Name: Fred Roberts Institution: Rutgers University Field of Study: Mathematics

What inspired you to choose this field of study?

Well, the field has to be defined very broadly because although I was trained as a mathematician, I have a lot of hats that I wear and I work on all kinds of problems. I'm passionate about environmental problems. I'm interested in issues of sustainability and energy use and climate. I'm also very interested in connections between the mathematical sciences and the social sciences, so in my professional life I've worked on psychology and sociology and problems of how small groups work well together — or don't. I'm interested in issues of communication and transportation, and I've also gotten very much involved in issues of homeland security, natural disasters and protecting the safety of people. And, I'm passionate about applications and mathematics as the language of science. I was trained as a mathematician, I got interested in mathematics but I love it because of everything I can do with it.

Early on, my inspiration was as a child of Sputnik. It was launched when I was in high school, launched by the Russians and it was a big shock to the Americans because we thought we were first in science and first in space and so on. That had a lot of influence on us when we were high school kids and we were encouraged to go into science. I was inclined in that direction anyway, but certainly there was a little bit of a push from Sputnik. It didn't hurt that my high school math teacher knew some very distinguished mathematicians and, when I started looking for a college, I happened to find a college where one of those mathematicians was the chairman of the Math Department. That was Dartmouth College and so I went there thinking I would study mathematics and that's what I did. But, it wasn't the way I thought it was going to go — I got very excited while I was there about mathematics and its applications, particularly in the social sciences and ecology and so it took off from there.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received?

If you're talking about advice about my scientific career, the best was "follow your passion and follow what you're really interested in" — and it's the same advice I give my kids. That is, you're spending a lot of the working and waking hours with the career that you choose, so if you don't choose a career you love, it doesn't matter how much money you make — that's not going to bring you happiness.

Another major piece of advice was how I chose the college I went to. The advice I was given was that choosing a college was a little bit like choosing a lifetime companion, a spouse or significant other. What's made for one is not made for another. So, again, let yourself explore, see what you think is going to work for you and don't try to over-analyze it.

What was your first scientific experiment as a child?

That's an interesting question. It was probably working with some of the Gilbert science sets that we had as kids. Probably the little chemistry experiments that I did.

What is your favorite thing about being a researcher?

I get to explore new ideas, to get to the frontiers of knowledge. I get to understand that mathematics is not just something in a textbook, but it's something invented by real people who are really doing things. And it gets me to explore all kinds of directions that I just haven't thought about before. I meet interesting people and meet interesting applications.

What is the most important characteristic a researcher must demonstrate in order to be an effective researcher?

It's very individual. I would say persistence is probably the most important thing for people like me — I may not be the smartest person in the world, but if I stick at it, I have a reasonable chance of accomplishing something.

What are the societal benefits of your research?

Well, I think that's the reason I'm doing research. I was one of the first people who worked on the growing demand for energy. We pinpointed all of the major sources and uses of energy and we looked at ways you might conserve — we looked at ways you might decrease our vulnerabilities because of the sources of energy that we have. I think that I've made a difference by focusing on environmental issues, whether it's the health of ecosystems or whether it's the changes in our climate. I think I've also made a difference in some of the security issues that we face. I've worked with a lot of government agencies, most recently the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is concerned with disasters like the hurricanes that we just experienced, earthquakes and other disasters. I'm also working with the Coast Guard on preserving the fish populations off the coast of the Northeast. Most people don't realize that the Coast Guard is concerned with things like the health of fisheries, they think the Coast Guard is just a law enforcement agency. I've also worked with the Coast Guard in helping them figure out how to save money by allocating their resources better. For example, how many boats of different kinds do they need and where do they put them?

We've also worked with the National Football League on stadium security, and that's been a lot of fun. Most people don't realize that there may be as many as 30 different agencies that are involved in making sure that the stadiums they enter, after they buy a ticket, are safe. And there's a lot of mathematics involved in that. We've modeled how you evacuate a stadium — some of our models were actually used when there was a lightning storm in a national stadium — and we've modeled how you inspect people entering the stadium to make sure that they're not bringing in something that might hurt somebody else. It's actually been fun, because it's gotten me to meet all these great, interesting people and I actually got to try on a Super Bowl ring as a result. We've also worked with the NBA, the National Hockey League and Major League Baseball. I never thought as a kid — and I liked sports — that I was going to get to do those things by being a mathematician.

Who has had the most influence on your thinking as a researcher?

Well, I have to say at different stages of my career, different people have. In college, I had a couple of professors who were very, very influential in my life. One of them was John Kemeny. John Kemeny was a Hungarian refugee who did his post-doctorate internship with Albert Einstein. (As an aside, he told a story of how when he was courting his wife, the key was to take her on a date to meet Einstein.) So, I was lucky enough to meet John Kemeny when I was just a college freshman, and I did my senior thesis under his direction. And he introduced me to a lot of really interesting ideas. I also met a professor as an undergraduate, Bob Norman, who was the one who introduced me to mathematics and the social sciences. I never realized until I met Professor Norman that there was a way that you could use math to understand behavior, and you could understand how people learn and you could understand how people relate to the world around them, the things they perceive. I never understood how neuroscience might be relevant, so there were all these things that I learned that way. He became a good friend. He came to my wedding, and in fact, I'm still in contact with him and he and I still talk about the mathematics of voting, and the mathematics of how groups make decisions. When I got to graduate school at Stanford University, Professor Kemeny introduced me to Patrick Suppes. Patrick Suppes was a really interesting guy because not only was he a professor of psychology and a professor of philosophy, but he was also a professor of statistics and a professor of education. And he ran the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences. So I went there partly to meet Professor Suppes. I met him soon after I arrived and he certainly had a huge influence on me because of the diversity of things he was interested in. He introduced me to some very interesting people, including R. Duncan Luce, a psychologist. Really he was a mathematician who has a degree in mathematics but he studied psychology and I ended up doing a post-doctoral fellowship with him. He recently passed away, unfortunately. He had a tremendous amount of influence on my way of thinking.

What about your field or being a researcher do you think would surprise people the most?

Well, I think what would surprise people is all the variety of things that mathematics is usable and useful for. Most of us have studied math when they're a kid and you think it's about numbers and you think it's about addition and multiplication and division and subtraction. You might learn a little bit of algebra or geometry, but you don't really connect with what it's good for. One of the things I've gotten into, and I think this is very important, is an effort to see that the world is very interconnected as far as all the fields of science and mathematics go. So, we're starting to see multi-disciplinary approaches to the problems of science. And we've started a project that I'm very excited about, which is to introduce those ideas to students in high schools. The example in that project is the connection between biology and mathematics, and I think it would surprise most kids in high school that mathematics is useful for biology. And I think it would surprise you whether you were interested in math or bio, that there's a connection. What we've done is to go into the math and bio classes and introduce them to how to use math in ecology and how to use math to understand the human genome and genetics, and how you use math to understand the spread of disease and epidemics. It has been remarkable how people have related to that. The first response we got was from kids in the math class, "Are you kidding me? We're going to do bio here?" And we got the same kind of response from kids in the bio class; "I thought math was in the math class? What are we doing with equations?" But, then it really opens up their eyes to the fact that you can understand biology better if you know some math and you can really appreciate math more if you see that it's useful for bio.

If you could only rescue one thing from your burning office or lab, what would it be?

At this stage in my life, probably my laptop. I travel a lot in connection with what I do, and so I've got most of my life right there on that laptop, most of my scientific life.

What music do you play most often in your lab or car?

I tend not to play music either in my lab or in my car. I listen to the news in the car. If I were playing music it would probably be country music. I also would play maybe some oldies, going back to when I was a kid.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Steven Glaser has been a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley since 1996. He is a research scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, faculty director of the Intelligent Infrastructure Initiative for the Center for Information Technology Research in Service to Society and a professor at the Technical University of Munich, Germany.

Glaser's specialty is designing, making and using sensors. His research covers a wide range of applications — from monitoring snow hydrology processes and water balance in the Sierra Nevada to studying the use of supercritical CO2 (CO2 with properties midway between a gas and liquid) for geothermal energy production. The high-fidelity, nanoseismic sensors he develops, which can measure displacements as small as one picometer (equal to one trillionth of a meter), allow him to image the local mechanics behind earthquake initiation.

Perhaps the eclectic nature of Glaser's work is due to his eclectic background. After high school he earned a B.A. in philosophy. During this time he entered the apprentice program of Local 77 of the International Union of Operating Engineers, became a journeyman, and then worked eight years as a driller. After a year working in Iraq, at the age of 31, he began his engineering career as an undergraduate freshman at the University of Texas, Austin.

Name: Steven Glaser Age: 60 Institution: University of California, Berkeley Field of Study: Civil and Environmental Engineering

What inspired you to choose this field of study?

I find most anything interesting, especially playing with hardware. If pressed, I would categorize my field as geophysics, which is a tremendously large arena. Over the years I have become more and more interested in trying to gain some understanding about the place we live — earth (undoubtedly fed by my years working as a driller). I have researched the behavior of rocks, geothermal energy production, laboratory and field earthquakes, mine safety, etc. This quest requires skills of all sorts, conceptual, theoretical, modeling, measuring. In particular I can assemble intricate machinery and electronics to make my variety of measurements. I grew up to be an excellent mechanic and I always played with electronics so I can have all the fun I want!

What is the best piece of advice you ever received?

"The smartest man in the room is not always right". — Richard Holbroke. This is a sharp way of saying, 'think for yourself.' People most often are blinded by authority of all sorts and at the university the authority is intellect. Lord Kelvin fought like hell for the idea that the earth was "more than 20 and less than 40 million year old." He used his fame as a powerful tool to silence objections. I always try to teach my students, undergraduate as well as PhD researchers that reputation and "smartness" should not interfere in their appreciation of a piece of work. I have given classes poor papers written by well-known researchers to analyze, and then help them realize they are discerning enough to find problems in the manuscript and suggest solid improvements.

What was your first scientific experiment as a child?

My first real experiment, when I was in 3^rd grade, involved demolition. My friends and I acquired a couple of M-80s, a sealed firecracker about 2 cm in diameter and we wanted to see how powerful it was. We carefully drilled a hole between a brick course on one of the columns of my front porch and packed in the explosive. We blew out three bricks! Of course we could not continue the experiment past that one data point, but the excitement was worth the punishment.

What is your favorite thing about being a researcher?

I love the freedom that it gives me — I can get an idea about a fascinating problem, map out an approach to implement it, put together the tools and funding needed, and go to work. Being at Berkeley, I have even more freedom, since I have such amazing advisees to share with. Having such accomplished students means I only need to be a coach, gently steering them along a successful path that they have chosen. In the end we all have fun, and somehow we always solve a meaningful problem.

What is the most important characteristic a researcher must demonstrate in order to be an effective researcher?

Insight, delayed gratification, consilience, systems thinking, mental strength, whimsy, creativity …

What are the societal benefits of your research?

I believe that all my work has meaning on two levels — elucidating a fundamental scientific problem and providing useful tools. My work on laboratory earthquakes started as an attempt to understand the basic mechanisms that make up friction. My student pushed this to examine the micro-mechanisms leading up to rupture of faults. In the end we have a paper in Nature giving an explanation of why some earthquakes shake the ground more rapidly, which is vitally important to help earthquake engineers design for our life safety.

I am also working on a snow hydrology project in the Sierra Nevada, examining detailed questions posed by earth scientists. It involves us measuring snow water equivalents across areas and time previously not possible without using our designed wireless sensor networks. This gives me the powerful tool of information. We can now optimize operation of hydroelectric dams while integrating flood control and water supply to farmers. Our technology will save California significant money while enhancing citizen's well-being.

Who has had the most influence on your thinking as a researcher?

This person would have to be Peter McLain, who taught me to be a driller. Being a big kid and coming from Cape Bretton Island in Canada, Peter went into the mines when he was about nine or ten years old. He had no schooling but was one of the most intelligent and observant people I have ever met. He taught me how to figure out solutions for problems I would never think I could solve, from changing out the clutch on a 50,000 kg crane carrier in two feet of mud to the geological properties of the rock 50 m down the hole. He always noticed the key variable and taught me to begin to do so myself. "Hey kid, what about …"

What about your field or being a researcher do you think would surprise people the most?

Most everyone I share it with is surprised about my background in philosophy. They believe that there is a strict dichotomy between humanities and science and technology. This thinking is more common for engineers, many of whom want an answer but can be uncomfortable looking under the hood. Philosophy is the search for understanding, asking the meta-questions, which is also what science is about. In addition I learned how to write, which is very helpful for producing successful proposals and accepted articles.

If you could only rescue one thing from your burning office or lab, what would it be?

Oh, that would have to be my genuine velvet Elvis. It is a rare treasure, especially since the Elvis estate prohibited the painting of them some time ago, saying they were in "bad taste." I would also take my special pencil, the one pencil I used for every homework and test for my entire engineering education. It is my hair of Sampson.

What music do you play most often in your lab or car?

I have grown exceedingly fond of chamber music, in particular Shostakovich, and Brahms for his thickness of sound. Brahms puts Phil Spector to shame. Chamber music permits a lightness and a fluid interplay between ensemble and solo presence which provides me immense pleasure. I also have an amazing collection of Kansas City and be-bop records, including a number of original Bird LPs. In high school Mississippi blues kept me alive.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

One of the great comeuppances for the human race was the realization that our DNA doesn’t differ very much from the DNA of other animals. Or plants. Even yeast.

The blow comparative genomics dealt to anthropocentrism and human vanity was a boon for medical science. Oliver Kerscher, a biologist at William & Mary, exploits the similarities between our DNA and the DNA of yeast to identify and study genes involved in genome maintenance and chromosome segregation.

“If I can understand the role of a certain gene in yeast,” Kerscher explains, “there’s a good chance that I can tell you the function of that gene in humans.”

Kerscher’s lab focuses on DNA damage brought out by hitches in the chromosome cycle, the process by which cells make copies of themselves. Botched genome maintenance during cell division is the root cause of a number of human medical maladies ranging from Down’s syndrome to spontaneous abortions to cancer. 

By studying the chromosome cycle of yeast — the very same stuff you use to bake bread — Kerscher’s lab has been able to make important contributions to the understanding of genetic problems in humans. 

Name: Oliver Kerscher Age: 44 Institution: The College of William & Mary Field of Study: Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics: Cell Cycle Progression and Genome Maintenance

What inspired you to choose this field of study?

There are many fascinating fields of biology, but when I began doing research in the early 90s molecular biology was just starting its heyday and biology turned from a descriptive science to one of deep molecular understanding. I was fascinated by the possibility to answer some of the ultimate questions about cell biology at very high resolution and so I sought out opportunities to get involved.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received?

Someone once told me: “Always do what you like and success will follow.” Life science research is very hard and I cannot fathom how someone would study something they are actually not enthralled with. I see this a lot with students who have the tendency to join a program because of a hip lab or a hot story in science. This is why, in my mind, it is so important that students try out a few lab experiences and internships before they commit. I find that once a student has found what they like it’s impossible to keep them out of the lab and that’s when their research really takes off.

What was your first scientific experiment as a child?

It sounds like a cliché, but I was one of those kids who always had worms and bugs in his pockets. When I was 6, I wanted to become a forest ranger and by 12 I had decided that my Ph.D. thesis was going to be on dragonfly maneuverability in flight. My first meaningful lab experience was during college when I interned for a summer in a molecular biology lab at Rockefeller University in New York. After that there was no turning back.

What is your favorite thing about being a researcher?

I have never dreaded going to lab, during the day, at night, weekends—it’s the whole experience for me. Of course I love “discovering,” but I accept experimental failure as a necessary part of research success. Nowadays, I enjoy work the most when I have a few particularly motivated students in lab who kick around models and experimental ideas. The social experience is definitely very important to me in research.

What is the most important characteristic a researcher must demonstrate in order to be an effective researcher?

In the lab or field a researcher must be passionate and highly motivated about his/her field of study. However, when experiments don’t come out as expected, researchers must always be willing to abandon a model or modify a hypothesis. I find it is also very important that researchers strive to make their research findings available to the public. Taxpayers fund much of our research and should know what we study and why we do our experiments. In a way, researchers must now be comfortable with being scientists, public educators and advocates of science in policy.

What are the societal benefits of your research?

Our research on cell cycle progression and genome maintenance in budding yeast informs the field of cancer biology. For example, in 2009 an undergraduate from our lab published our data that a new class of yeast enzymes was associating with double-stranded DNA breaks (DNA damage is often a starting point for cancer). Last year, researchers doing similar research in mammalian cells found out that the human equivalent of the yeast enzyme was doing the same thing. I like to believe that our research has a lot to do with some advances in human cancer biology.

Who has had the most influence on your thinking as a researcher?

In graduate school I had a very intense Ph.D. advisor who was a great teacher. I was passionate about the research, worked hard, and he taught me the ropes of how to do meaningful experiments with the powerful budding yeast models system. As a postdoc I worked with a brilliant scientists with a much more even temperament and I think that challenged me to take the time to look at my results from many different angles. In the end I try to pass on to my students a bit of what I have learned from all of my experiences, and so far that seemed to work because they do very well when they leave my lab.

What about your field or being a researcher do you think would surprise people the most?

One of my graduate students was once asked about our field of study. When he replied: "We study how cells divide!" the person questioning him said, "Cell division? Don't we already know how cells divide?" My student was quick in his reply and said: "If we did know everything about cell division, cancer would by now be curable!" I remember the stunned look on the face of the person questioning him. I think it is very surprising to folks how little we actually know about biology and how much basic research affects them.

What music do you play most often in your lab or car?

It's a bit embarrassing, but I like what I call "intelligent electronic music" (Tiesto, etc.) My students have much more varied and interesting musical tastes and mostly I enjoy listening to what they play in lab.

Editor's Note: This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Johns Hopkins University (JHU) researcher Matthew Kerr is interested in understanding how the brain is able to control hands and arms with such dexterity and improving methods of neural signal processing. His long-term goals include helping amputees such as the many young men and women who have lost limbs while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We would like for people to be able to control their prosthetic limbs as naturally as they do their own limbs,” he says.

Kerr is a PhD candidate in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at JHU and researches in the Neuromedical Control Systems Lab of Dr. Sridevi Sarma.  He is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and a Raytheon ARCS Foundation Scholar.

Kerr has presented his work both domestically and as far away as Istanbul, Turkey.  In his free time he enjoys married life, hosts a Bible study, and plays squash.

Name: Matthew Kerr Institution: John Hopkins University Field of Study: Biomedical Engineering

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

As a graduate researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, I design and build biofuel reactors and study how the chemicals that make up plants interact with catalysts to form fuel. I use a combination of experiments and mathematical models to gain a deeper understanding of the chemistry involved.

Under the direction of George Huber and Lakis Mountziaris, I study a technique for producing biofuels known as catalytic fast pyrolysis. Rather than using microbes, CFP is a one-step, thermo-catalytic technique for converting inedible plant matter (such as sawdust, corn stover and switchgrass) into fuels that work in today’s automobiles. As industry integrates this and related technologies on a progressively larger scale, you’ll hopefully start seeing green gasoline at your local pump. Unless there’s a sign that tells you your gas came from wood or grass, you won’t be able to tell the difference.

For more information, see Green Gasoline Comes Closer to Fueling Your Car.

Name: Robert Coolman Age: 26 Institution: University of Massachusetts, Amherst Field of Study: Chemical Engineering, Biofuels

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Francine Berman is Professor of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She serves on a broad spectrum of national and international leadership groups and committees, including the newly-established Research Data Alliance, which involves more than 120 U.S. and international participants, and enables researchers around the world to share and collaboratively use scientific data to speed up innovation. She also serves as a member of the National Science Foundation's Computer and Information Science and Engineering Advisory Committee. The Library of Congress recognized Berman as a “Digital Preservation Pioneer” and Business Week and Newsweek listed her one of the top women in technology. In December of 2012, she joined a chorus of other computer science professionals to promote computer science education at all levels.

Name: Francine Berman Institution: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Field of Study: Computer science

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Statistics researcher Iain Johnstone became immersed in the world of statistics like so many young people do, as a sports fan. He is a native of Australia, so in his case, an enthusiasm for sports had him following the stats of cricket stars such as Donald Bradman. Today, he deals with weightier topics, and is drawn to the field of statistics for its blend of theory and application, what he calls "an ideal combination of the concrete analysis of data with the opportunity to use mathematics in a powerful way . . . [Y]ou can work on a variety of projects, some quite applied, and others more theoretical and make contributions of different types on each . . ."

Johnstone is a professor of quantitative science in the Department of Statistics at Stanford University, with a joint appointment in biostatistics in Stanford's School of Medicine. He received his Ph.D. in Statistics from Cornell in 1981. He also is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former president of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

Below, he answers our 10 questions.

Name: Iain Johnstone Age: 55 Institution: Stanford University Field of Study: Statistics

What inspired you to choose this field of study?

I found maths relatively easy and fun in school, and it didn’t tax my lousy memory in the way that some of the other sciences did. Since when I was younger, we only encountered statistics at university, it was then that I found that statistics seemed to me to provide an ideal combination of the concrete analysis of data with the opportunity to use mathematics in a powerful way. I found that you can work on a variety of projects, some quite applied, and others more theoretical and make contributions of different types on each, and then I was hooked.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received?

When I was a young researcher, my senior colleagues told me, “Do what you like, but do it well.”

They also told me that vast productivity was not necessary or even necessarily good, and this gave me the freedom to pursue the topics I was interested in, without always feeling that I had to hurry to get the next paper out. Another sentence I remembered from a mentor was attributed to Henri Poincare: “a young mathematician has many beginnings” — which I took as permission to be a bit of a dilettante.

What was your first scientific experiment as a child?

I suppose at least some statisticians find their vocation through a fascination with data and figuring out what it (or they, as data is grammatically a plural) mean. In my case, I grew up in Australia, with a fascination for cricket, and so I would keep score like a maniac, following along with the so-called “first class” games, not realizing of course then that that’s called collecting data. There was a time when I knew and understood all the arcane statistics associated with Donald Bradman’s career, perhaps the greatest batsman ever, such as why his career test batting average was 99.94. But I also want to say that what really turned me on to a career in statistics was the university, where I had my first contact with people who were really passionate about mathematics and statistics.

What is your favorite thing about being a researcher?

The excitement of finding out something new, especially after a period of groping around without success. And the freedom, at least some of the time, to follow your curiosity where it takes you, because you never know where you will end up. To illustrate: I was involved in a group consulting activity many years ago, but didn’t consciously pursue the research questions that we were posed at the time. Browsing through old files recently, I was amazed to see that a largest eigenvalue problem I got interested in much later, and on which I wrote an influential paper, was actually one that was posed to that group and I had — at least at the conscious level — completely forgotten that!

What is the most important characteristic a researcher must demonstrate in order to be an effective researcher?

To be effective, I think it is more than one thing. First, it helps to be broadly curious both within and beyond your subject, and of course to have good ideas. To that I would add a researcher needs enthusiasm and tenacity in order to follow through on those ideas, for example if the first few things you try don’t work, or if the referees of your papers aren’t instantly convinced of the importance of your results. And a collaborative spirit is very helpful, because much research, especially in statistics, is interdisciplinary, and working with other like-minded people is just very enriching and fun.

What are the societal benefits of your research?

We (my co-principal investigator David Donoho and I and our students) study statistical theory and methods, so the benefits to society are indirect, but very real. They come through the work of other scientists and engineers who either use our results or are in some way influenced by them. My work has been used by genetics researchers in genome-wide association studies, which look for genes associated with serious diseases.

David’s has contributed to the founding of a new technology known as compressed sensing, which for example has led other researchers to develop methods that allow magnetic resonance imaging machines to capture images much more quickly. Some of our earlier work together contributed to the wider use of wavelet-based methods in signal and image processing.

Who has had the most influence on your thinking as a researcher?

Staying for this answer with people who are no longer with us, I would mention Fisher and Wald. R. A. Fisher was perhaps the most influential statistician of the last century, and introduced and studied deeply many of the ideas and methods that are now basic to our subject. Abraham Wald laid the foundations of statistical decision theory, which provides a framework for principled comparison of statistical methods.

What about your field or being a researcher do you think would surprise people the most?

Perhaps it would be the huge variety of experiences and ways of working that are available to a statistics researcher. You can be a solitary investigator, or work in a small group, or in a large team, and often you can be on projects of each type at the same time. You can be thoroughly immersed in a particular domain of application, such as genetics or neuroscience; or you can work on core problems that are common to several application areas. You can use mathematics as your primary research tool, or computational investigation, or even (in the case of a few of my colleagues) run a wet lab. You can work in academia, or in the private sector (both start-up and multinational), or in government, and perhaps all three along the stages of a career.

If you could only rescue one thing from your burning office or lab, what would it be?

Well, it’s not the interesting answer you might be hoping for, but my laptop would have to be first, as it has my scientific life on it. The second choice might be my copy of the collected works of RA Fisher, as so many of the fundamental ideas of statistics may be found there, along with a wonderful geometric intuition.

What music do you play most often in your lab or car?

Well it would be classical music, especially Bach. However, my partner is from Spain, and so I spend of lot of time in the car with audiobooks in Spanish trying to improve my comprehension, so that I can do a bit better with her family when we visit!

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation. 

Name: Sylvester James Gates Institution: University of Maryland, College Park Field of Study: Physics

As a ball rolled down an incline, young Sylvester James Gates, along with the other students in his class, were tasked with timing it and observing the principles of mechanics in action. "I saw a piece of magic happen right before my very eyes," he says. "Because, while I was well aware that mathematics was something that takes places between your ears, I had no idea mathematics actually described things outside of our ears. And so . . . this was the closest thing to magic I had ever seen." Today, Gates uses the magic of math to study elementary particles and the fundamental forces of nature.   

He is known for his groundbreaking work in supersymmetry and supergravity, areas closely related to superstring theory. In 1983, he co-authored the seminal book "Superspace or 1001 Lessons in Supersymmetry.

Gates is also dedicated to the popularization of science and the promotion of science education and science careers to young people. In 2007, the American Association for the Advancement of Science honored Gates with its Public Understanding of Science and Technology Award.  

A John S. Toll Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, Gates is a member of the President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He received his Ph.D. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  

Below, he answers our 10 questions. 

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

MIT environmental engineer Roman Stocker studies the interactions between the tiniest marine organisms, their fluid dynamical environment and their food sources. That work has conveyed understandings that shed light on global environmental processes.

A 2009 study of the micrometer-sized photosynthetic marine organisms called phytoplankton showed that the coupling of these cells' swimming behavior and ocean currents leads to the formation of intense layers of these creatures — which could be precursors of toxic algal blooms. Another study from Stocker's research group found that marine microorganisms are strongly attracted to sulfur compounds — the chemicals that give the sea its characteristic smell — and that this behavior could affect the chemical properties of the ocean and potentially influence global climate by altering cloud formation. 

Most recently, Stocker showed that ocean turbulence directly affects the ability of marine bacteria to recycle organic material back into the food web, a process that can alter species composition and ecosystem productivity. Stocker's work at the interface of fluid mechanics and microbial ecology has also led to insights in other fields: by discovering that the chirality of bacterial flagella leads to drift relative to flow, a 2009 study from his group revealed a new method for separating "right-handed" from "left-handed" molecules that could have broad applications in chemical engineering. Stocker's most widely known research was inspired by his cat Cutta Cutta.

Watching him one day over breakfast, he began to think about just what is going on when a cat laps milk. High-speed videos showed that a cat's tidy lapping of water or milk is governed by the competition between liquid inertia and gravity. The news appeared everywhere from the front page of the New York Times to Le Monde to Jay Leno's opening bit.

An associate professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, Stocker is a winder of the Maseeh Award for Excellence in Teaching. He received his Ph.D. in environmental engineering from the University of Padua. Below, he answers our 10 questions.

Name: Roman Stocker Age: 37 Institution: MIT Field of Study: Fluid Mechanics and Microbial Ecology

What inspired you to choose this field of study?

It's really two fields! I got into fluid mechanics because I was fascinated by how water moves: the aesthetics of it, the mechanics of it, and its powerful consequences. Only later I realized that one of the coolest things in water is … life! And some of the most amazing, most diverse, and most important life forms are microbes. So now I work at the interface of fluid mechanics and microbial ecology.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received?

'Be positive' (from my dad). He actually said it a bit differently — he said "Unless there is a strong reason not to, why not smile?" — but 'be positive' is what this meant for me. Certainly 'positive' can be a character trait, but I believe it is a trait one can strongly influence. I think about those words from 30 years ago pretty often … and they still successfully make me smile every time!

What was your first scientific experiment as a child?

Trying to dam up little mountain creeks during summertime hikes, so as to build small pools in which to wade and splash. I found it intriguing how the water passed around, underneath and above the different materials I put in its way and this drove me to 'engineer' new obstacles, new components of my dam. Of course, it was a never-ending quest, for the water always found a way, but I now see that this was part of the fun!

What is your favorite thing about being a researcher?

Exploration. Which comes from freedom. Interrogating nature about its secrets, whether on a discovery trip or by peeking through a microscope. Doing it without constraints, primarily for the sake of understanding. And doing it in a team, where brainstorming sessions can become like detective work and the understanding one more of nature's secrets is a team victory.

What is the most important characteristic a researcher must demonstrate in order to be an effective researcher?

Creativity. Many other qualities are important: persistence, technical skill, logic. But I believe creativity — finding just the right experiment, asking just the right question, drawing just the right connection — is the most valuable quality, and the one I find myself continuously longing for.

What are the societal benefits of your research?

Understanding the environment, and particularly the ocean, so that we as humans can prevent impacting it and, ultimately, hurting ourselves.

Who has had the most influence on your thinking as a researcher?

It's not a single person, it's a specific period in my education. I'm Italian and in Italy you can choose high schools with different areas of focus. I attended a humanistic gymnasium. It was a detour, for my strengths were more quantitative and eventually I studied engineering in college, but it was a most valuable detour, as it provided me with a background in literature, philosophy, ancient history, and a passion for writing and languages that — unexpectedly I must say — I have come to consider key strengths in my current work as a researcher. The ability to write a clear and broadly appealing scientific paper, craft a compelling grant proposal, prepare an intriguing lecture, all contain major components that go beyond the technical knowledge.

What about your field or being a researcher do you think would surprise people the most?

About my field: how "alive" the ocean is, even at its smallest scales. Go to the beach, scoop up a handful of water, ask how many microbes live in it. Few suspect that the answer numbers in the millions and how important those millions of microcritters are.

About being a researcher: how much persistence and rigor are needed. Some of our studies have taken 4+ years and have resulted in a 4-page paper. A year per page??

If you could only rescue one thing from your burning office or lab, what would it be?

I would actually not worry too much. There are certainly some personal things — family pictures, a couple of drawings — that I am attached to, and others that it would take time and money to replace — all the equipment, some custom-made tools. But, ultimately, the most valuable resource is what we know and how we think: fortunately, those are not very flammable!

What music do you play most often in your lab or car?

Italian songwriters ('cantautori'), in particular from 10-15 years ago. De Gregori is my favorite, but also Zucchero, Jovanotti, Dalla ... probably exotic-sounding names to a non-Italian reader! They've always had, for me, the right balance of poetry, tune and simplicity: a good balance to strive for!

Editor's Note:This research was supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

From Jennifer Balch, a fire ecology researcher and assistant professor at Penn State’s Department of Geography:

We need to reassess the role of fire on Earth. My research aims to understand the patterns and processes that underlie disturbance and ecosystem recovery, particularly how shifting fire regimes are reconfiguring tropical forests, encouraging non-native grass invasion, and affecting the global climate.

My current and future research addresses the following major unsolved questions: What is fire’s role in the Earth system? More specifically, how does fire contribute to global trends of climate warming and how does climate warming promote fire? A second question I am looking into is how fire regimes are altered by invasive species.

Particularly, how is an invasive grass-fire cycle established and perpetuated? I am also researching how the recent unprecedented increase in human-initiated fires is altering tropical-forest dynamics, and how this increase in fire frequency is changing carbon cycles and the recovery trajectories.

In addressing these questions, my research aims to explore global patterns of anthropogenic climate and land cover disruptions to help inform people about opportunities to curb and adapt to these changes.

Name:  Jennifer K. Balch Age: 35 Institution: The Pennsylvania State University Field of Study: Fire Ecology

LiveScience.com: What inspired you to choose this field of study?

I think it is part of human nature to be attracted to and disturbed by fire. I first began thinking about the fire cycle and people’s relationship with fire while on a Fulbright grant in Venezuela. I had the opportunity to work with a researcher who was looking at the Pemon indigenous peoples’ fire management strategies in the Gran Sabana (an incredible landscape of savannas and forests with tabletop mountains that were featured in the movie “Up”).

I distinctly remember seeing a little boy playing with fire by the side of the road. He was delicately sprinkling sparks from a burning stick every few feet, and I remember thinking, “Wow, where’s your mother, hasn’t she told you not to play with fire?” And then it dawned on me what a complex and intriguing relationship we humans have with fire. Here was this little boy implementing a dispersed and brilliant fire management strategy that has been honed over countless generations — which was to burn often and in a dispersed way to maintain a mosaic of burned and unburned patches. The effect is to create a series of firebreaks by reducing fuel availability and limiting the potential fire intensity. It really got me thinking.

LiveScience.com: What is the best piece of advice you ever received?

“You can be anything you want to be, but you ain’t gonna be nothin’ unless you get yourself an education.” – My grandmother.

LiveScience.com: What was your first scientific experiment as a child?

When I was a kid, I wanted to test if people’s eye color changed depending on the day. So I took all these photographs of my friends in the same spot in the classroom day after day. Turns out they were taken against a sunny window and were consequently all backlit, so I couldn’t see my friends’ faces even. The lesson being that you should make sure your equipment and experimental design are sound. The hypothesis remains untested.

LiveScience.com: What is your favorite thing about being a researcher?

One of my favorite things is when those moments of lucidity come, when the complexity of the natural world begins to unravel itself and you see one small seed of truth. Research and conducting the scientific method in a robust way requires a lot of work, but when you do get there it is reassuring that one seed of knowledge can move us forward.

LiveScience.com: What is the most important characteristic a researcher must demonstrate in order to be an effective researcher?

Persistence, persistence, and more persistence.

LiveScience.com: What are the societal benefits of your research?

Better understanding of fire will help us adapt to changing fire regimes, particularly where there are bigger fires, more frequent fires, or fires in places where we don’t normally see fires. We need to shift from thinking of fire as a disaster phenomena to thinking about what are the sustainable fire regimes that we can tolerate and live with against the backdrop of changing climate.

LiveScience.com: Who has had the most influence on your thinking as a researcher?

There are too many to name…I feel that I sit on the shoulders of giants.

LiveScience.com: What about being a researcher do you think would surprise people the most?

It takes an incredible amount of creative energy, there is an art to science.

LiveScience.com: If you could only rescue one thing from your burning office or lab, what would it be?

Well, wouldn’t that be ironic. I probably wouldn’t rescue anything. The lesson from fire ecology is that there is always some sort of renewal and rebirth after a fire.

LiveScience.com: What music do you play most often in your lab or car?

A little Ani DiFranco and Lady Gaga. And sometimes, if I need some real inspiration, I play “Firework” by Katy Perry.

Learn more:

Fire Is an Important and Under-Appreciated Part of Global Climate Change

Scorched Earth: The Past, Present and Future of Human Influences on Wildfires

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

If Cheryl Wilga's laboratory had an official soundtrack, it might be the notorious thump … thump … thump from the soundtrack of the movie "Jaws." That's because she and her research team study anatomical features and behaviors that impact the individual survival of fish — including the feeding behaviors of sharks and the role of the shark's iconic pectoral fins in swimming.

Name: Cheryl Ann Denesha Wilga Age: 51 Institution: University of Rhode Island Field of Study: Functional Morphology

What inspired you to choose this field of study?

When I was a child, I was always fascinated by the diversity of animal behavior and read everything I could get on the subject. One of my favorite games to play with other children was "school," and I always wanted to be the teacher. Later in college, I worked as a surgical assistant for a veterinarian and was fascinated by the muscle and bone surgeries and what was done to restore function to an injured body part. At the same time, I conducted several undergraduate research projects with two scientists who studied fish morphology and function. Then I realized that I could satisfy my fascination with animal behavior and love of teaching by becoming a professor at a university where I could study whatever catches my interest and teach others about animal behavior.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received?

My parents told me that the most important thing about a career was to be happy doing it. As a student, the best advice I was given was to make sure that you understood what you learned in class, rather than memorizing everything, and to study as much as you can. This worked very well, since I received enough scholarships based on grades to pay for my entire education. As a faculty member, the best advice was to maintain a work-life balance, and to sequester myself at least one day a week in a place where no one else is around (for me this is home) to analyze and write. This way, I have more time to help others when at the university.

What was your first scientific experiment as a child?

Although not really an experiment as much as an exercise in animal behavior, I tried teaching our dogs to do what I wanted them to do. It was much easier for me back then to get my dogs to do what I wanted them to do than it is for me now to get the animals that I currently study to do what I would like them to do! My other early projects involved determining how many young a pair of guppies can have. This worked very well but was limited by the number of tanks my parents allowed me to have!

What is your favorite thing about being a researcher?

Initially it is figuring out the mechanics of a new behavior with my graduate students (the life of the lab, in my opinion). But I consider it just as satisfying to tell my students about the cool behaviors that researchers identify in vertebrates. The students in my classes enjoy learning about how sharks feed, how salamanders project their tongue to catch prey, how lizards can run up walls, how birds fly and how dolphins echolocate (locate objects by reflected sound), for example.

What is the most important characteristic a researcher must demonstrate in order to be an effective researcher?

You must be self-motivated and persistent in figuring out methods. Know where to find help when you need it and have faith in yourself, you made it this far!

What are the societal benefits of your research?

I do lot of outreach that I enjoy. My graduate students and I work with several teachers at a local inner city middle school. We bring fish and other vertebrates to their classes for demonstrations, we give talks there, and we bring students to our university to run experiments. It is great fun and inspires some of the students to think about going to college. We also give talks at other schools, local libraries and aquaria, particularly during (Discovery Channel's) Shark Week.

Who has had the most influence on your thinking as a researcher?

I have been fortunate to have had excellent advisors who were influential in different aspects of my academic career: Karel Liem from Harvard University, who passed away in 2009, taught me to enjoy learning and life; Philip Motta gave me a solid grounding in research and taught me how to balance research and home life; and Peter Wainwright and George Lauder taught me how to practice excellent research.

What about being a researcher do you think would surprise people the most?

Probably that scientists frequently spend nearly as much time managing a lab and grants as conducting research and writing.

If you could only rescue one thing from your burning office or lab, what would it be?

My students! Everything else is backed up somewhere else or replaceable.

What music do you play most often in your lab or car?

I listen to classic rock in my car because I like to sing to the music. I listen to classical music in the lab so I can still work and not be distracted by words!

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

A pristine coastline is hard to find. But on the Atlantic coast of Virginia’s Eastern Shore, a largely undeveloped landscape of shallow bays, marshes and barrier islands offers a natural laboratory for scientists studying environmental change. The Virginia Coast Reserve Long-Term Ecological Research project, funded by the National Science Foundation, brings together a multidisciplinary, multi-institution group of researchers with a common goal: to understand and predict how long-term processes (like climate change and sea level rise) and short-term events (like storms and species invasions) shape the ever-changing coastal environment.

At the helm of this enterprise is Karen McGlathery, a marine ecologist and University of Virginia professor. As lead investigator, she works with scientists and students who study all environments of the VCR LTER site — water, land and the intertidal zone. Most importantly, she steers the effort to integrate their findings into an understanding of the landscape as a whole. McGlathery has led the VCR LTER site, which was established in 1987, for more than 10 years; she is now ushering it into its sixth phase of NSF funding.

In her own research, McGlathery focuses on the impacts of global change in shallow-water coastal ecosystems, particularly at the intersection between plant ecology and chemical cycles. Drawn to the coast from an early age, she appreciates its dynamic nature: Even as an expert in the field, she remains ready to be surprised.

Name: Karen McGlathery Institution: University of Virginia Field of Study: Coastal marine ecology

What inspired you to choose this field of study?

I’ve always been interested in environmental issues, and in coastal systems in particular. If I think back, it’s partly due to my grandfather, who was an officer in the British Navy and the Merchant Marines. I grew up spending parts of my summers on an island in New England, visiting him. He was very passionate about the ocean, and I have vivid memories of him taking me down to the beach during a nor’easter — watching the waves as they moved perpendicular to the beach, and the wind whipping the sand against our legs — and I just found that very exhilarating. I think that made a huge impression on me. As I pursued environmental studies in high school and college, I always gravitated to coastal systems.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received?

I guess it would be the same advice that I give to students: Follow your interests and your passions. I think if you’re really excited about something to which your research has applications, you’ll be that much more effective, both at achieving results and at communicating the relevance and importance of your work — to anyone! To your mom, to your grandma, to your students, to your peers and to the general public. It’s because I get excited about what I do, and I love what I do, that I think I can do it best.

What was your first scientific experiment as a child?

Most of what I did as a child was not so much experiments as it was making observations — just observations about the nature around me. … One of my avid hobbies was gardening with my father; that was a big deal. You need nutrients to make plants grow — maybe I got interested in that kind of thing back then. I’ve always been much, much more interested in plants than animals, in terms of the coastal zone.

I’m helping my kids do their own scientific experiments for school, which is interesting. One is looking at how Coke affects your teeth — so, she’s putting her baby teeth in cups of Coke and watching the potential degeneration over time. My other daughter is looking at the memory of animals (her dog) — how fast it works, and how long it lasts — so she’s going to be doing a series of behavioral trials. They’re really interested in hypothesis generation and hypothesis testing.

What is your favorite thing about being a researcher?

Something I find exciting about being a researcher is the idea of serendipity — that you just don’t know what’s going to happen. There are these moments when surprises happen and things just begin to come together, and you can’t always anticipate how that’s going to happen. And for me, that’s so satisfying. I really find that fun.

What is the most important characteristic a researcher must demonstrate in order to be an effective researcher?

I think being open to surprises and uncertainty, and embracing those when you come across them. You should never stop learning. One thing I love about my department is that I’m always working with people who can push me outside of my comfort zone, and I get the chance to put things together in new ways that I never expected. So, just being open to that, and being able to run with it when you see it, is really important.

What are the societal benefits of your research?

My research historically has been on the effects of nutrient over-enrichment, or eutrophication, in shallow coastal zones. That’s important because eutrophication is one of most pervasive environmental impacts on coastal systems, leading to low oxygen and [affecting] commercially important fisheries and wild habitat quality. Since coming to UVA, I have expanded that focus to think also about climate change and invasive species impacts in coastal systems. Climate change obviously has the potential for large-scale impacts on coastal regions, wetlands and tidal marshes, and also sea grass meadows, where I do most of my work.

If we can understand enough about the mechanisms that cause these changes, then we can begin to forecast different future scenarios of change — nutrient enrichment or climate change or invasive species. That’s really important to stewardship and management of coastal habitats. One of the biggest challenges is that many of these systems have tipping points — they don’t just respond linearly to a change. And that’s part of the uncertainty. Trying to anticipate when those dramatic changes might happen is really important. That’s one of the very big questions we have, and it also has societal relevance.

Who has had the most influence on your thinking as a researcher?

I’ve had a lot of really great mentors. If I think about the more formative years, there was my high school AP Biology teacher, Dan Cappel. He was the one who really got me excited about ecology, even though we were just looking at a pickled shark. And he really encouraged me to go to the college that I went to, Connecticut College, and study with a professor there who also turned out to be really influential [on me]. It’s interesting, because a couple of years ago, I was reading Time magazine, and there was a cover story about high school educators; the woman who wrote the article, a science writer, had actually gone to my high school, and she highlighted Dr. Cappel as having been so inspirational to her and motivating her for the career that she had. And I thought, wow, me too. That really struck a chord in me. I think probably, in general, we undervalue high school math and science teachers in this country.

The professor I worked with at Connecticut College was Bill Niering, who was one of the real intellects in wetland and coastal ecology at that time. He was just amazing. He had this incredible energy and enthusiasm. He really inspired me to go into my field.

What about your field or being a researcher do you think would surprise people the most?

Maybe that we’re still trying to figure a lot of things out. I think sometimes people think that science is very black and white, and that we just know the answers. I think the process of refining our knowledge sometimes surprises people.

If you could only rescue one thing from your burning office or lab, what would it be?

My students! The program wouldn’t exist without students. I would run into the building and carry them all out. Once the students were out, very expensive pieces of equipment would probably be the next thing.

What music do you play most often in your lab or car?

When I’m in my car, I’m usually with my 11-year-old [twin daughters], so I’m usually listening to their music. And when I’m not listening to their music, I’m usually trying to catch up on the news.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Marine ecologist Paul C. Sikkel calls smaller marine organisms such as parasites “the smaller majority,” because they account for large percentages of the members of coral reef communities without receiving due recognition for their ecological importance. Despite the generally underappreciated status of relatively small reef residents, the discovery by Sikkel’s research team of a new coral reef parasite — which Sikkel named Gnathia marleyi after Bob Marley — garnered coverage by dozens of major media outlets all over the world. For more information about Bob Marley’s new namesake, see this press release.

Sikkel — who runs a marine laboratory at Arkansas State University — studies host-parasite-cleaner interactions on coral reefs, and the influences of changes in reef ecology triggered by climate change.

Sikkel has involved undergraduates in coral reef research and taught field courses in marine ecology for the past 15 years. His lively, creative teaching style (which incorporates Jimmy Buffett’s music) is profiled in an article and slide show.

In addition to leading research projects and teaching, Sikkel passionately communicates the science of the sea to the public. His work has appeared in popular outlets such as Natural History and National Geographic, the award-winning film Seasons in the Sea, and the television series National Geographic: Wild Chronicles. More information about Sikkel’s outreach activities is posted on his website.

What inspired you to choose this field of study?

Like so many other marine scientists, I grew up watching Jacques Cousteau on TV. Once I started snorkeling in seventh grade: that was it! I was hooked.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received?

Find what stokes you and go for it! (That advice is courtesy of Dr. Mark Hixon, my doctoral advisor).

What was your first scientific experiment as a child?

I’m not sure it really counts as an experiment per se, but I used to spend hours watching animals in nature (birds, lizards, fish — you name it) and writing down what they were doing and wondering why they were doing it.

What is your favorite thing about being a researcher?

Being in the field and seeing things few people ever see! The thrill of discovery and being an insider to nature’s secrets! Being on a coral reef at dawn!

What is the most important characteristic a researcher must demonstrate in order to be an effective researcher?

Curiosity, imagination, creativity, patience and persistence.

What are the societal benefits of your research?

I now work on what I call “the smaller majority” — the tiny organisms, such as parasites, that really run natural systems but rarely get the headlines. Understanding these organisms is essential to understanding how ecosystems work. I also use my research as a teaching tool for students ranging from K-grad.

Who has had the most influence on your thinking as a researcher?

Wow! Tough question. I have been influenced by so many people, not all of them scientists.

But some of my early mentors were:

• Jack Bradbury: Behavioral Ecologist, U.C. San Diego. Now retired. He was a topnotch and very passionate field biologist.
• Peter Klimley: Shark biologist. Currently at the University of California, Davis. He was a Ph.D. student at Scripps when I was an undergrad at University of California, San Diego. He gave me my first research opportunity, working on hammerhead sharks in the Gulf of California. I worked with him for four years.
• Dory Fragaszy: Her full name is "Dorothy." She studied primate behavior at San Diego State University where I started my undergraduate work before transferring to University of California, San Diego. She was my mentor there and I took several classes from her. She is now at the University of Georgia.

Later, my mentors included:

• Mark Hixon: Mark was my Ph.D. advisor at Oregon State University where he is currently a professor of marine ecology. He was the perfect advisor for me and I continue to collaborate with him.
• Bob Warner: Bob Warner recently retired from University of California, Santa Barbara. He is arguably the best marine fish behavioral ecologist ever. He and Mark were the ones who advised and encouraged me most during my Ph.D. work. Bob was on my doctoral committee.
• Don Kramer: Don Kramer was my postdoctoral mentor at McGill University during my research at the McGill marine lab (Bellairs) in Barbados. I think Don is the most eclectic and creative person I have worked with. 
• E.O. Wilson: Wilson biologist, researcher theorist, naturalist, and author who is generally considered to be the world’s foremost authority on ants. He was the Joseph Pellegrino University Research Professor in Entomology at Harvard University, and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.

I do not "know" Wilson but have met him twice, once in Barbados and once in Louisville, Kentucky. I use his books in my introductory classes because he is a master at bringing the thrill of discovery in biological science to the lay person, is a strong conservationist, and truly appreciates the intimate link between the arts and sciences. If I could have coffee with anyone in the world, it would be with E.O. Wilson.

What about being a researcher do you think would surprise people the most?

There’s a lot of art and intuition involved. It’s also very hard work — people who do research, including those who work with me — know that, but most people don’t realize just how hard we work. But, it’s also great fun — in fact, it’s an addiction.

If you could only rescue one thing from your burning office or lab, what would it be?

Well, besides my portable hard drive and pictures of my kids, probably my Bob Marley paraphernalia and my signed copies of E.O. Wilson books.

What music do you play most often in your lab or car?

My musical staples include Bob Marley (I also enjoy the music of Bob Marley’s oldest son — Ziggy Marley).

It is important to note that my naming the species after Bob Marley has nothing to do with the fact that this species is a parasite and everything to do with the fact that I think it is a really cool organism and I am a huge Marley fan!

I am also a big fan Jimmy Buffett, Neil Young and the Grateful Dead and Jimmy Buffett: I still get the chills every time I listen to his live version of A Pirate Looks at 40, which blends into Bob Marley’s Redemption Song!

Another favorite of mine is Santana. So I was particularly thrilled when a friend of mine recently told me that he heard Carlos Santana mention during one of his recent concerts that a newly discovered species had been named after Bob Marley!

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

For a researcher who builds robots, Maurizio Porfiri credits his success to an unexpected source — literature. Paul Auster's novels in particular, with their scenes of Brooklyn, which is home to the researcher’s own Polytechnic Institute of New York University.

As a teen growing up in Italy, Porfiri read Auster as well as Robert Musil, Mikhail Bulgakov, Philip K. Dick and John Fante. They helped shape his creativity, he says. “Being creative and being curious is more important than being the smartest or the best at equations if you want to be a great engineer or researcher,” he tells Brooklyn grade-school students during a demonstration of the robotic fish he designs to mimic leadership cues of real fish. The goal is for the robots to direct living fish away from danger.

In 2012, Popular Science included the self-described “okay student” in its Brilliant 10 — an elite group of scientists under 40 whose work stands to dramatically impact their fields. Porfiri, who holds a Ph.D. in engineering mechanics from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and a Ph.D. in theoretical and applied mechanics from Sapienza University of Rome, is also a recipient of a 2008 NSF CAREER award.

Below, he answers the ScienceLives 10 questions.

Name: Maurizio Porfiri Age: 35 Institution: Polytechnic Institute of New York University Field of Study: Dynamical Systems

Questions:

What inspired you to choose this field of study?

My main drive was my interest in being at the interface of different fields. It’s there that I can always learn more, and this feeds my curiosity and desire to expand what I know. I was trained in electrical engineering and moved into mechanics. With the multidisciplinary research I’m doing now, I can go beyond both electrical and mechanics.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received?

It’s from my grandparents: “Identify what you want to do and just do it. Don’t worry about it being too hard in the short-term. Focus on the long-term.”

What was your first scientific experiment as a child?

They weren’t exactly experiments, but there are two things related to what I do now as a researcher that, looking back, really influenced me. My uncle bought me a little electrical kit that I used to make a radio. That represents the engineering side of what I do, the putting things together part. The other thing is really where my heart was. It was the science side, the observations I made of animals at the zoo and the aquariums I went to with my family as a child.

What is your favorite thing about being a researcher?

There are three: 1) That I always have to keep learning 2) being a professor and helping others grow in an academic sense and beyond, and 3) having the freedom to choose what I want to address in my research based on what I want to study over my career.

What is the most important characteristic a researcher must demonstrate in order to be an effective researcher?

Being humble is very important. You have to be okay with not knowing everything and being open to learning from others. Humility also helps in nurturing the work ethic of the students you train. While good researchers need to be humble, they also need to be stubborn. This helps to develop the perseverance required to do quality research.

What are the societal benefits of your research?

Most of the benefits are environmental. My research, and what I work with my team on, potentially will help protect endangered animals and animals in dangerous situations like environmental disasters.

We also use our research to inspire young people to understand that engineering is just as much creative as it is technical, maybe even more so. Our work is extremely visual and exciting for kids. They see the robotic fish and see a different dimension to engineering. We hope it impacts their thinking about a career in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, mathematics).

Who has had the most influence on your thinking as a researcher?

There are so many people who have influenced me. Some I have met, some I haven’t. Of those I’ve met, my Ph.D. advisor at Virginia Tech was particularly influential. He taught me what it really takes to grow as a scientist and engineer.

Of the people I’ve never met, writers such as Musil, Auster, Dick and Fante were really important in shaping my personality. Reading them as a teenager nurtured the creative part of me. Musil especially helped me see the emotional side of science and mathematics.

What about your field or being a researcher do you think would surprise people the most?

That you have to be the inventor of your own problems. The experiments researchers work on are of their own making. This requires a type of creativity that I think many would find fascinating and exciting to learn about.

If you could only rescue one thing from your burning office or lab, what would it be?

A photograph of my mother when she was four years old.

What music do you play most often in your lab or car?

The National is a band I like a lot. Death Cab for Cutie, too. Then there’s the 80s music I listen to: The Cure, The Smiths, Depeche Mode.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation the funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

Yogesh Joglekar, assistant professor of physics at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, works on graphene and optical waveguides with balanced loss and gain, two of the hottest fields in theoretical physics. In addition, he mentors a growing number of high school and undergraduate students who are carrying out original research that is published in top-tier physics journals. A National Science Foundation CAREER grant supports his graphene research and mentoring.

Name: Yogesh Joglekar Age: 38 Institution: Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) Field of Study: Graphene, PT-symmetric lattice systems

What inspired you to choose this field of study?

When I joined the physics department in the School of Science at IUPUI in 2005, graphene had just been discovered, and I couldn’t wait to start theoretical research on it. It is fascinating that such a day-to-day material — pencil lead — serves as a prototype for testing exotic quantum field theory predictions and will also lead to new device applications within the next decade.  It’s very exciting to be working in a field that has recently been recognized with a Nobel Prize.

My second research area is open systems with sources and sinks, such as light traveling in a medium with loss and gain. These systems are called ‘PT-symmetric lattice models’. A high-school student working with me in this field obtained some very intriguing predictions. As we tried to understand them, I realized that this is an ideal area to involve young students in high-level, original research.

What is the best piece of advice you ever received?

The inventor Thomas Edison said, "Success is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.” The best career advice I received was from my graduate advisor Allan MacDonald who paraphrased Edison a bit, and told me that “Success in research is ninety percent perseverance, five to seven percent inspiration, and the rest is luck.”

What was your first scientific experiment as a child?

The first ‘cool experiment’ I did as a child was a science project where my friends and I filled glass-beakers with different liquids to create lenses with different magnifying powers. We were all about 14 years old and couldn’t believe we could make magnifiers out of things like water and oil and use them to focus sunlight and start a fire.

What is your favorite thing about being a researcher?

Being a researcher at IUPUI allows me to explore questions that I find interesting and to discuss the questions and their possible answers with novices — high school, undergraduate and graduate students — and experts alike. The thrill of that (occasional) insight and of understanding something deeply and perhaps differently is my favorite part of the job.

What is the most important characteristic a researcher must demonstrate in order to be an effective researcher?

An effective researcher usually needs to have a combination of curiosity, the desire and ability to follow through, and a certain level of objectivity that is necessary to evaluate your results.  Enthusiasm, a sense of humor, and good communication skills are also important!

What are the societal benefits of your research?

The graphene research explores the possibilities of electric current flow without resistance and the production of a laser-like light via excitonic condensation. My research on PT-symmetric lattices explores the control and manipulation of the motion of light. Both of these studies lead to a deeper understanding of the flow of electric charges and electromagnetic waves, which is necessary — but not sufficient — for designing new electronic and optical materials.

An equally important benefit of theoretical physics research, particularly for young students, is that it teaches them critical thinking, model building and carrying out reality checks on their results. These skills are applicable to and required in any STEM discipline and beyond. Many young students remain interested or become interested in pursuing science careers as a result of hands-on research. So an important societal benefit of our research is that it is putting some bright students on paths to careers in science and encouraging others to be science literate in whatever fields they pursue.

Who has had the most influence on your thinking as a researcher?

Richard Feynman, one of the greatest teachers and a physics Nobel winner, has influenced me greatly over the past two decades. When I was in high school, I read ‘Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!’ and it solidified my decision to pursue physics. His intellectual abilities were exceptional. His curiosity and the drive to understand the world around him were superlative and so was his desire to convey the understanding of physics to the public at large. He was equally passionate about explaining subtle quantum physics and the effect of cold on O-rings, like those that doomed the Challenger space shuttle. He heavily influences my research, particularly when working with young students, and my teaching. 

What about your field or being a researcher do you think would surprise people the most?

People usually think that research in theoretical physics requires graduate level training. They are surprised to learn that, given the right problems, even high school students can produce original work. The youngest student co-author in my group is a 13-year-old; we have had four other high school student co-authors on two different papers. This involvement of young students in high-level research is a surprise to most people. When people hear the term “theoretical physics” they more often think of scientific genius rather than a high school or undergraduate student.

If you could only rescue one thing from your burning office or lab, what would it be?

Being a theorist, most of the important stuff is in my head. So I would just go back for thank-you gifts from my students including an XKCD web comic poster!

What music do you play most often in your lab or car?

I grew up in Mumbai (Bombay) with Marathi as my native language; I went to IIT Kanpur where Hindi was the primary language, and then came to the US where English is the main language. So my music is an eclectic collection across these three languages. I am especially partial to classical (both Indian and Western) and classic rock.

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

When David Ferrucci was introduced to computer programming as a high school student questions flooded his mind … Where does it stop? What can I get the computer to do? "My mind immediately went to the idea of artificial intelligence ... It was just overwhelming, you know, and exciting."

A significant moment, given that Ferrucci would one day lead a team at IBM that developed Watson, the computer that famously won a three-day game of Jeopardy in February, 2011 — the popular game show's first machine/human matchup and a milestone in the field of artificial intelligence.

Ferrucci's team designed the computer system to understand and precisely answer questions posed in natural language, with all of the latter’s complexity, nuance and ambiguity. And, Watson had to be able answer Jeopardy-style questions, which contain riddles and irony not to mention constructions that are sometimes quite contorted. Watson also is able to assess its chances of being right and thus answer with varying degrees of confidence. As this video says, “Watson knows what it knows and it knows what it doesn't know.”

As big an event as it was, Watson's win only "scratched the surface" of the project's potential, Ferrucci says. The system's future holds exciting possibilities, including health care applications such as diagnostic assistance.

Below, Ferrucci answers 10 questions related to his life as a scientist.

You can follow Watson on Facebook.

Name: David Ferrucci Institution: IBM Field of Study: Artificial Intelligence

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation,the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.

This ScienceLives article was provided to LiveScience in partnership with the National Science Foundation.

How does diversity arise? Does it make a system more productive? How does it impact the overall strength of a system? Does it make a system prone to large events? These are some of the questions Scott Page, professor of complex systems, political science, and economics at the University of Michigan is helping to answer.

Page's research focuses on the myriad roles that diversity plays in complex systems. Over his career, he has taken that research and challenged community groups, high schools, corporations, government agencies, Non-Governmental Organizations and university audiences to think about how diversity works.

He has written three books and many papers in disciplines including economics, political science, computer science, management, physics, public health, geography, urban planning, engineering and history.

He says one of the most rewarding aspects of his career is the opportunity to work with brilliant people. Here he answers the ScienceLives 10 questions.

Name: Scott E. Page Institution: University of Michigan Field of Study: Social Science, Complex Systems

Editor's Note: The researchers depicted in ScienceLives articles have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the federal agency charged with funding basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. See the ScienceLives archive.