spun out cool projects: Legislators Aloft, teaching Washington State legislators how to climb trees and consider forest biodiversity as a value to protect; and Canopy Confluences, camping out with a mixed group of scientists, musicians, artists, and writers—getting them all into the canopy to create art, music, and poetry that might raise awareness about the importance of trees in those who gravitate toward the arts. It was at Evergreen that she became interested in bringing science and nature to people other than her own tribe. She began giving sermons to religious groups, not as scienceversus-religion, but science and religion, studying how the values of trees are expressed in holy scriptures of the world’s major religions. She began working with the incarcerated, developing the Sustainability in Prisons Project. Prisons and jails became sites for not only science lectures but for sustainability research and the rearing of endangered species by incarcerated men, women, and youth. Her office walls became cluttered with national awards. After ninteen years even Evergreen was becoming a groove, and she was approached by the University of Utah to run a new Center for Science and Math Education (CSME). Our children were fledged, and we decided to groove-hop again. Utah recruited us both and we joined the Department of Biology, now the School of Biological Sciences, in 2011. Nalini came knowing there would be challenges, reentering the culture of a large research university, and… in a place with so few trees! Times have changed since her stint at an R1 university in the 1980s. At the U she found a welcoming faculty, collegiality, and institutional goals of greater inclusivity and interdisciplinarity. During her time in Utah, Nalini has continued her research on canopy ecological interactions. She has also blazed a path in science outreach and communication, both locally and nationally. She taught courses and coordinated workshops in effective science communication. She continued her focus on the incarcerated, with the Initiative to bring Science Programs to the Incarcerated (INSPIRE) in Utah. She brought her science training to bear in quantitative studies of prison environments, showing that nature imagery reduces rates of violence in prisons. She has engaged scientists with youth in custody of the juvenile justice system with her STEM Community Alliance Program (STEMCAP). She has mapped trees on church grounds. She has arranged for the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square to sing nature-oriented hymns to the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America that was to be held in Salt Lake City (alas, nixed by the pandemic). She learned how to use a lathe to make wooden bowls, a new connection to her beloved trees. So what is retirement for Nalini? She has always been strongly allergic to academic politics, administrative burdens, and anything that smacks of routine (except perhaps her breakfast of one boiled egg and a piece of toast). Retirement for Nalini will be a time to focus on some of her favorite projects, but also a time of reflection and prospection. Who knows what will happen next. I’ve never been disappointed.
In Memoriam:
Friedrich Bonhoeffer F
riedrich Bonhoeffer, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, passed away on January 29, 2021 in Tübingen, Germany; he was a renowned scientist whose pioneering research revealed how axons find their targets during development, recognized by the 2020 Gruber Prize for Neuroscience (jointly with Corey Goodman and Marc Tessier-Lavigne). Bonhoeffer came to spend a sabbatical with Gordon Lark in 1972 at the newly-formed Department of Biology and made seminal contributions towards establishing Molecular Biology at Utah. Earlier in his career, he had an enormous impact in the field of DNA replication, by isolating the first temperature-sensitive mutants in DNA replication; one of these stopped DNA replication immediately (the gene was later shown to encode the DNA polymerase present at the replication fork). The DNA replication mutants that Bonhoeffer isolated were essential to defining the replication complex. He remained closely associated with molecular biologists at Utah in the 1970s (including the Lark, Wechsler, Olivera and Greenlee laboratories). After Bonhoeffer switched his research focus to neurodevelopment, several graduate students and faculty members from Utah trained in his laboratory, including the late Chi-bin Chien and Rolf Karlstrom, a Biology PhD student with Mike Bastiani, who became Chair of the Biology Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. 7
