2009-2010 Charles Bullard Fellows in Forest Research

Harvard Forest is pleased to announce the 2009-2010 Charles Bullard Fellows in Forest Research. The purpose of this fellowship program, established in 1962, is to support advanced research and study by persons who show promise of making important contributions, either as scholars or administrators, to forestry defined in its broadest sense as the human use and study of forested environments.

This year’s Bullard Fellows were selected from a large pool of international applicants and cover a broad array of forest-related subjects. These six distinguished practitioners and academics from across the United States and the globe will spend one to two semesters conducting research based in Cambridge or at the Harvard Forest in Petersham.

Fellows are supported by an endowment named after the benefactor Charles Bullard. While in residence at Harvard, Fellows interact with faculty and students, give seminars, participate in conferences and symposia and avail themselves of the University's great research resources. Applications are being accepted for 2010-2011.

"The Harvard community benefits immensely from the presence of the outstanding scholars and fellows supported by the Bullard program,” says David R. Foster, director of Harvard Forest and chair of the Bullard Fellowship committee. “The breadth of research encompassed by this year’s class of scholars is vast, ranging from botany and evolutionary biology to tropical ecology and conservation and from soil science and modeling to science journalism."

The Charles Bullard Fellows for the 2009-2010 Academic year are:

Shinichiro Aiba explores patterns of plant diversity in Japan and Borneo. An Assistant Professor at Kagoshima University (Japan), Aiba has worked in Malaysian Borneo, especially around Mount Kinabalu, since 1995. He and many collaborators have collected thousands of plant specimens. The Harvard University Herbaria is research center of taxonomy of Bornean plants, and Aiba will use the Herbarium collections to make standardized species identifications. This will enable the collaborative study of beta-diversity of tropical trees at species level, or species turnover across all of Borneo based on plot data collected by researchers in different countries. While at Harvard, he will collaborate with Stuart Davies and Campbell Webb.

Kamal Bawa, Distinguished Professor at the University of Massachusetts–Boston, is an evolutionary ecologist, tropical forest ecologist, and conservation biologist, now working in the area of sustainability science. He was a Bullard Fellow in 1972, from which he launched a research program in reproductive and population biology of tropical trees. Now he will synthesize much of this research, while continuing work on exploring approaches for community based conservation. In particular, he will continue a project in the Eastern Himalayas to test the idea of whether conservation of biodiversity can be enhanced while alleviating poverty, with the explicit goal of measuring progress on economic, social and economic fronts.

Shabtai Cohen is an experimental botanist from the Institute of Soil, Water and Environmental sciences, ARO Volcani Center, Israel. During his 10-month fellowship, Cohen will collaborate with the Holbrook Lab in Cambridge and Harvard Forest to further the development of sap flow measurement technology and the understanding of hydraulic relationships in the tree’s water transport system and their influence on the interaction of the plant with the atmosphere.

Quentin Cronk, Professor of Plant Science at the University of British Columbia, studies the evolutionary genetics of wood formation. Wood is a substance of paradox. It is the most abundant biomaterial on earth but most species of plants (i.e. herbs) produce very little of it. We rely of wood for building, paper, industrial materials and as a potentially sustainable source of energy, yet our knowledge of the cells that produce it lags behind our knowledge of other cells. During Cronk’s 6-month fellowship, he will conduct research using the living collections of the Arnold Arboretum, and collaborate with Harvard researchers that share his interest in woody plant biology.

Christopher Neill is an ecologist at the Marine Biological Laboratory. He studies both temperate and tropical ecosystems, and he will use the fellowship to synthesize effects of Amazon deforestation on watershed ecology, hydrology and biogeochemistry. The Amazon is a superb example of how the fate of the major forests of the earth is intricately connected human activities and global change. During his 10-month residence at Harvard Forest, Neill will use interactions with Harvard researchers with expertise in forest history, forest disturbance, fragmentation, carbon exchange and history of human settlements to place these changes in a broad ecological and historical context. In addition, Neill will draw on his experience communicating science to a broader audience to determine the potential of initiating hands-on science journalism courses at Harvard Forest and other Long Term Ecological Research sites in the northeastern US that share a focus on forests and changing land use.

Nsalambi Nkongolo is a soil scientist and Associate Professor at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. While in residence at the Harvard Forest, he will study the spatial distribution of soil properties and above ground vegetation carbon stocks of Harvard Forest and Ituri Forest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He conducted field work at Ituri Forest and in Nigeria during the summer prior to arriving at the Harvard Forest. This work is in collaboration with Eric Davidson (a long-time Harvard Forest collaborator from the Woods Hole Research Center) and the Center for Tropical Forest Science.