MOVERS & SHAKERS

It’s a Texas winter morning, but Bruce Benz – professor of biology and one of Texas Wesleyan’s longest-serving professors – is already fired up. He’s talking about conservation, climate change, and the future his students are surveying as they graduate.

He cites the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s estimate that 2,800 acres of Texas prairie is gobbled up every year for development – habitat killers like strip malls and poorly planned housing developments. “It can’t get any more important than right now,” Benz said, “I am challenging my students to think about the reality ahead.”

The hard numbers can be staggering: The World Wildlife Fund reported in 2020 that wildlife populations had declined by 68% since 1970. “No one is paying for the cost of these lost organisms,” Benz said. “With extinction comes a loss of diversity.”

With research experience like his – he’s an Indiana Jones-like traveling researcher who has hopped across the Western Hemisphere and is often cited in conservation biology research – it’s impossible to ignore the interconnectedness of humans and the physical world. Those connections drive his work growing strong, diverse intellectual communities.

He and Chitra Chandrasekaran, associate professor of biology, started at Texas Wesleyan about a year apart more than 25 years ago. Since then, they have pushed students to connect their academic pursuits with their personal passions. Many Texas Wesleyan biology students plan to attend medical school after graduating; but going deeper into graduate or professional school means navigating the complex world of academic research and publishing. Benz and Chandrasekaran created a vital head start into their program with undergraduate research that has students studying urgent topics, attending professional conferences, and even sharing bylines with their professors.

The students understand the value of their dedication – and remember it.

Robert McManus ’21 now works as a research assistant in a lab that studies Parkinson’s disease at UNT Health Science Center. He’s still collaborating with Benz on many conservation biology projects he worked on as a student at Texas Wesleyan.

White rosinweed (Silphium albiflorum), an endemic flora found mostly in Central Texas, has been a major focus for Benz’s research. McManus and Benz are working together to register white rosinweed on The International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species, the most comprehensive inventory of its kind. They’ve also presented at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, Beta Beta Beta (the biology honor society), and they are preparing to publish more research analysis soon. The research is data-driven and granular, but McManus said it reaffirms the scientific concept that “more diversity, in general, is a good thing for biological systems – and all systems – for resilience.”

McManus, like Benz, carries an ambitious research load, but he loves how often he finds himself lost in the work. “It’s fun for me,” McManus said. “Granted, [research can be stressful], but I find myself more stressed when I’m not doing something, because I think of what I could be doing. The cool thing about science is that science makes you think more deeply about philosophy.”

Benz is ever the realist – his research is sounding alarm bells about the future – but he’s far from a pessimist. Like McManus, he sees the philosophical link between resilient, diverse communities in nature and education. “Silphium is endemic, or found in a certain area,” Benz said. “I look back at my career at Texas Wesleyan and see I have some endemic qualities, too.”