Diana Wall

Seag:

This is Morgan Seag. I’m speaking with Dr. Diana Wall, University Distinguished Professor and Professor of Biology at Colorado State University. Today is February 20th, 2018, and we’re speaking at Dr. Wall’s office at CSU. So, can we start at the beginning? Where are you from?

Wall:

Originally? You mean, where was I born?

Seag:

Where were you born?

Wall:

I was born in Durham, North Carolina.

Seag:

And what were your parents like?

Wall:

My father was a professor of American history. And my mother was a biology teacher.

Seag:

So, were science and academia part of your upbringing?

Wall:

Well yes. I think that academia, the teaching and writing job my father did at the University of Kentucky were a large part – in the summers we went to other universities so he could teach and have some summer salary. And then, I think the biology part came from my mother, in that she liked to be outside, and liked us to be outside, and we went on short trips outdoors in parks around Kentucky – if it was just going to be breakfast, her cooking breakfast over a grill at a park nearby or something, we’d do that. Or, more rarely, take camping trips.

Seag:

Where would you go camping?

Wall:

Mostly in Kentucky.

Seag:

Did you enjoy it?

Wall:

Yes! I liked it, a lot.

Seag:

Did you have siblings?

Wall:

I had an older sister and have a younger sister. And...I would say that the older sister also did some outdoor stuff; the younger sister, too.

Seag:

Were they interested in history or science like you and your parents?

Wall:

Yes, I think all of us are, I think that thread goes all the way through our growing up and gave us an appreciation for history, the diversity of people, and the region, and the US history. And, you know, that kind of daily discussions – you just can’t exclude it, because the historians talk like somebody who’s famous and dead as your friend, or you know, as someone who shaped a nation. So, we got a lot of that.

Seag:

What about the environmental interest?

Wall:

The environmental was on the margins, I don’t think that played as big a role. But the diversity of students from all over the state led us to visit them in coal country when I was growing up, and so both environment, politics and history were all a part. I mean I did take biology, and I was very interested in it. I had good biology teachers, but it was… Well, I should say, I was in Girl Scouts, so – I’d forgotten about this – but I was in Girl Scouts, and I stayed involved in Girl Scouts all the way until almost I was a senior in high school. And the reason was, this Girl Scout group that I was in from about 8 until beyond high school had canoes. And we could go on the river and go paddling, and the appreciation for the limestone cliffs, the waters…so that was a lot of fun. When we were in high school, we’d go down to the river and camp and then go canoeing and that kind of thing. So, I liked that a lot.

Seag:

Do you remember who your troop leader was?

Wall:

Gosh, no. Oh I know her name was Sherry, but I can’t remember the last name, I’d have to think that up.

Seag:

And so, it was a group of friends who you were in the troop with?

Wall:

Yes, I mean I met friends, and then there were just friends I had in high school, and we could just go down there to the lake. I mean, I don’t even think there was a charge at that time. I don’t remember paying anything; we’d just go down for a few days and camp there, and then go use the boats.

Seag:

What kind of schools were you in?

Wall:

Uh, there were two; basically, just two. I went to one that was just like kindergarten to sixth grade, public school, and then the public school, next one, was eighth grade to – or seventh grade to graduation.

Seag:

And did they have a particularly strong science program?

Wall:

I didn’t pay much attention to that then, you know – I think my education from my parents was, you take some of everything offered and required so you learn something. But I liked to play too much. I liked to be outside, and read, and there were just a lot of things that I did. So, some courses, I paid less attention to than I did otherwise. I would say there just weren’t that many women that I knew at that time, or my age, that were doing anything in science, except high school teachers. I mean, there were men, I also had a male biology teacher, other teachers in, physics, or chemistry, or something like that, were women. And so you could see a career being a nurse, or a mother, or a teacher; but you didn’t see much of a science career beyond that. Put it this way, my parents were not directing me to hurry up and get married and have kids, which is a lot of what the dogma was then. It was – well, you’ve gotta do something to have a job, what’re you gonna do? And so when I went to college, I was a biology major – a botany major – and partially history. But it was mostly, I had a biology major.

Seag:

What did you think you were gonna do with it?

Wall:

Teach high school. [Laughter]. That’s what I thought – I just – I just didn’t think beyond that, because I didn’t know many women professors at all. And then I just happened to be at the right place at the right time. When I was in graduate school in botany, the chair of the department was very good at saying, you know, this is... there’s a new building coming up, and it’s over across campus in a different department, and you know, have you ever thought about doing that, versus what you’re doing here in botany? And I thought, yes! I’ll try that. And so that was a move that I haven’t regretted.

Seag:

Do you remember what that person’s name was?

Wall:

Oh, yes. His name was Dick Chapman. And he – he was really good, in that – I mean, he was excited about the new building, it was partially new toys, you know, the equipment was better, and the rooms were better, and the microscopes were better, everything was better – but it…and at the time, I wasn’t that passionate about what I was doing in botany. I hadn’t gotten a thesis project yet. I was teaching labs, botany in general, and another course, that kind of thing, as a graduate student. But once we got over to the – new to me – plant pathology department, and I started understanding that there were parasites of plants that were in soil, that just fascinated me. And so that was kind of the, “wow, these are the microscopic animals living in soils that you can recognize through a microscope. I mean you can see the differences in the species, and – and they parasitize plants and cause all these reactions? And the farmers know about ‘em, but nobody else studies ‘em that much?” I found that really fascinating. So that’s what I loved – it just was a total switch from what I’d been doing.

Seag:

What had inspired you to apply for graduate school?

Wall:

Basically, what am I gonna do for a job? You know, do I need to go get a masters so I can teach better, or teach biology better, or work as a typist in an office somewhere. It was about a job. Now I see it was a career that was exciting vs a job.

Seag:

Did you consider doing a teaching certificate instead of continuing with science?

Wall:

No, I actually didn’t. I got more carried away with, “well, I wonder why that is, and how is this, and…” So those kind of thoughts arose out of discussions with graduate students, and with professors. So, I didn’t have a driving direction, but I started learning that you could get a Ph.D.

Seag:

Was any of that that you were learning that a woman at that time could get a Ph.D.? Or was it all –

Wall:

It was probably all. But there were changes, it was the Vietnam era, so there were a lot of people – men – getting drafted. A lot of my male colleagues in graduate school were getting drafted. And so that left – it was kind of like a little nucleus of women who were working on different aspects of science in plant pathology. A couple of them finished and went on and got jobs in major universities, others went onto medical fields. So, you just start picking this up, that it’s possible. And then of course you start paying attention – I started paying more attention to in my particular field, and where – what papers or books are there showing women Ph.D. scientists in my field that I could talk to, or know? And at that time, people – or rather we students didn’t go to conferences, national conferences, I guess we just didn’t have the money. I don’t think I went to a national conference until I was through graduate school. And now, you know, everybody wants their graduate students to go to meetings right out of the dock, get that experience.

Seag:

And how did you pick your – did you end up doing your thesis on the bacteria in the soil?

Wall:

No, my thesis was mostly on nematodes: they’re just small, tiny roundworms that parasitize plant roots. And so I did that on clover, one nematode genus and species on clover. The Chair of Plant Pathology which is in Agriculture at that time, he offered me a research assistantship and that was his area of research, soil nematodes.

Seag:

Oh, wow.

Wall:

Yes.

Seag:

What year is that?

Wall:

That was... um, it must’ve been about ‘71.

Seag:

So. you got your Ph.D. in ‘71 from the University of Kentucky.

Wall:

Right. Yes. And then I married, and he was almost drafted but he joined the Coast Guard and we moved I think in ‘70 to Mobile. And the helicopter squadron he was with for the icebreakers at that time was based in Mobile, Alabama... and ‘cause you signed up for four years then... so it must’ve been about ‘74 or ‘75 that we got out of the service.

Seag:

Is that why you moved –

Wall:

Yes.

Seag:

What were you doing there?

Wall:

Most anything I could do. [Laughs]. So, you know, I didn’t have a job, but had a Ph.D. and I did everything from, you know, sell baseball ads in the summer to I finally got a job teaching in a private girls’ school there as a biology teacher, taught eighth grade, eleventh grade. That was a hard – that’s a hard job, I’ll tell you, teaching high school is hard. And they – the students were great, but you have to stay ahead of them. And then my last, I don’t know, year or something, I taught at Mobile College, and I taught microbiology for nurses. And then we were moved to LA, and he was on the – he was on the helicopter squadron out of LA airport.

Seag:

For the Coast Guard?

Wall:

Yes. For the Coast Guard. And then, I had called a colleague of mine and said, do you know of any postdocs available in the UCalifornia system near LA? And this friend of mine was at Berkeley. He was a Kentucky guy with a Ph.D. in Plant Pathology. And he said yes, I just heard of one actually in Riverside, and you need to stop there. And so we drove right from Mobile to there, and I walked in, and they said yes! And that’s how I fell into that first post doc and a job. It was a great department with some of the super stars in nematology. So, I – we ended up based out of Santa Ana, so John would drive into LA airport and I would drive the sixty miles to Riverside. Yes. I had a postdoc there for about 2-3 years.

Seag:

Working on nematodes?

Wall:

Yea. There’s a department of nematology there. In fact, there’s two departments of nematology in the UC system – University of California system.

Seag:

Were you invited to define your own research agenda?

Wall:

At that time, no. I was – I came on board as a post doc with a professor who had a project, but he – and it was more ecological, which was way out of my training – and he was going on sabbatical, so that left me with a big research project. It was to look at nematodes in four deserts across the West, as part of an international bio – let me see, what was it called – international biological program. And so many scientists collaborating in nations, all of them looking at the transfer of energy from sun to plants to soil to atmosphere, and where does all the energy go, and then putting it into models that they could look at. And it was really eye-opening to me, because all of a sudden I started becoming more of an ecologist, thinking more about nutrient flow through ecosystems, carbon flow through ecosystems, trying to quantify the biomass and the energy of nematodes in soil systems, and spatial distribution. So, it was really educational – I was left on my own, and I really came to like deserts and the soils and the role that nematodes played in plant production – and also, decomposition, just decay of organic matter.

Seag:

And were you doing field research or lab?

Wall:

It was mostly field research. Yea. So I would have, for example, in Nevada, in the Mojave, I had some colleagues from UCLA, and there was a group of ‘em also at the Nevada test site out there, and once a week, I would get – they would take some samples for me and send ‘em in, and every once in a while I had to go get my own. So, I’d get about 32 soil samples a week from there, every week including Christmas, and other times I’d fly to the Great Basin Desert in Utah or go to a site that was near Phoenix or one in New Mexico.

Seag:

And did you enjoy the field research?

Wall:

Yes. I really liked the field research. Yea. I liked both that at the lab research, too.

Seag:

Did you have a community in the field, or were you working in pairs, or –

Wall:

No, usually – I mean there were times when there would be people in the field with me, but it was mostly...you know, get on a plane, take my stuff, get there, get a rental car, stay there for a few days, go get my sampling done, you know, refrigerate ‘em, and then I would bring them back to Riverside. And I would do what I call running the soil samples: I would extract the nematodes out of the soil. So it’s basically adding water and sieving the soil so you get the nematodes, and then you count those under the microscope, and then you would get, you know, either total numbers or males/females, or the genus or trophic group, whatever the purpose was. And so no, it was pretty much – there might be somebody that would go with me, but I didn’t have my own lab; I just had what was in the professor’s lab, and I used all that equipment.

Seag:

Were you camping out in the field, or staying in hotels...?

Wall:

No, most of those were hotels – although I would say I was camping out, but I was in some very cheap hotels [laughs] or motels, or whatever. But you know, one lightbulb, and that kind of thing, to save money on the grant. It was an NSF grant that I was working on. So that was – and what was also good about that is, I was just one part of all the people who were studying all the plants, and the animals, and carbon flow, and species of plants, and so there from all over the world, and even the East Coast, who studied deserts, and we would all meet every – I don’t know whether it was once a year, twice a year, and have these big science meetings and everybody would report. The modelers would say how far they were getting on predicting energy flow. I mean, this was totally off my radar. They weren’t thinking about agriculture, so it was just like starting over, you know. It was pretty interesting.

Seag:

Was there a name for the international project?

Wall:

Yea, it was just called the IBP: the International Bio – I wanna say International Biological Program. And most of the results were published in Oikos in about 1972, I think. I think that’s right. And so there was a desert biome, and here there was a grassland biome, so this interest in all the ecosystems in the world, well… Fort Collins was the kind of the headquarters or the lead for the grassland biome that stretched north into Canada. So later on, I started getting grants that brought me here to CSU, and I would work on the shortgrass steppe with some of the colleagues that were here. So, it – this research – allowed you to get – to be working in different places, like in Las Cruces, near that Chihuahuan Desert site there. And we still do work there.

Seag:

And was the Antarctic on your radar?

Wall:

It wasn’t on my radar. I mean, it was on my radar because when my husband was in the Coast Guard, he was doing the work, you know, he was supporting scientists in the Arctic and the Antarctic, and of course we’d see hundreds of pictures of ice when he came back. And the Dry Valleys, actually, there were some pictures of the Dry Valleys in that. And then there was another time when my father was interviewing a geologist in Phoenix, a geologist in Phoenix who – two of ‘em, actually – who had been Presidents of the Geological Society of America, and we went over for drinks one night, and it turned out one guy had been the geologist on the Byrd expedition in Antarctica. And that was so totally cool, I mean – and at that time, I was not planning on any Antarctic research at all.

What happened that led me that direction was, I had a colleague who is named Ross Virginia, and I still work with him, so it’s just amazing, we keep talking about this – how our careers have gone. I met him at UC Riverside, and then he got a job at San Diego State. And we continued to work in deserts. He worked at the Jornada site near Las Cruces. I had a grant, he had a grant, that sort of thing. And I – my questions, our questions, had to do with how do you tell that nematodes – the actual species – are really doing anything in soil, because you have so many other complexities (soil type, rainfall, lots of species of other invertebrates) that interact with it. So, you can’t really tease it apart and say, nematodes are doing this, ants are doing that. Sure, you could know how much carbon in each species, but you just couldn’t tell ‘em apart.

And so, I was at a meeting in Hawaii, and another colleague from Stanford and I got in a conversation and he said, “Diana, you oughta go someplace where there are no plants. ‘Cause the plants overwhelm the other organisms in the below-ground system. And then you might have fewer species and be able – might be able to isolate what nematodes do.” And I thought immediately, my first thought was somewhere near Las Cruces like White Sands. And I wondered if that would work. But that sand and sand dunes were too shifting. And so we – Ross and I started talking more, and then there was this cold desert, Antarctica and it wasn’t all ice. The ice-free area called the Dry Valleys that I’d heard about, and I wrote a colleague who had worked there and later started the NSF Long Term Ecological Research Network, and said, could you send me some soil? And he put it in a little plastic bottle, and sent it – it was much easier then, it was no permits – and sent it to March Air Force Base, which was very near Riverside. And I went over and collected it, and we ran the soil samples, and we saw some nematodes, and that was the start of thinking about, let’s write this NSF proposal. We didn’t think we’d get it. We didn’t have a clue we’d get it. And that was the first proposal, when we went down ‘89 to ‘90 I think.

Seag:

And who was the colleague?

Wall:

The colleague’s name is Ross Virginia; he is at Dartmouth.

Seag:

Oh! That was Ross Virginia who sent it to you.

Wall:

Oh! No, no, sorry, it was Bob Wharton.

Seag:

Oh, okay.

Wall:

Bob Wharton, yes. He was the first PI of the McMurdo NSF LTER – he’d been going down before, he was a lake aquatic person, and he – I mean, he was down there with all the greats of the frozen lake years, that worked in Lake Hoare. Diane [McKnight] can tell you a lot about that. But he was also a desert guy: he was at Desert Research Institute at that time. And so, yes, he’s the one, I just called him up and said – I didn’t call him up, but got word to him, would he send some soil to us.

[break]

Seag:

So, we’re back, with Dr. Diana Wall, and we had just finished up with you beginning to become involved in Antarctic research. And because we’ve only got a few minutes left, I wonder if we can look at the time period that we’ve just been talking about, and think about how the nature of your research, and the kinds of collaborations you’ve been involved with, changed over the course of your early- to mid-career, and connections perhaps to what you’re doing now.

Wall:

Sure. I think a lot of it, in my particular field, was very individual research. We were promoted, or recognized, for individual research: what’ve we done in our lab, what’ve we done in the field. In public – the standard was that your publications should be with one or maybe one other person. And that was it and – that was commented on in meetings. So I had, because of this research with the NSF Desert biome, the hot desert (and I still work in hot deserts) – and because of this big project (the International Biological Program) where there were modelers and plant people and soil people and animal people and water people, a shift in my individual research from my Ph.D. to collaborative interdisciplinary ecosystem level research. It was a huge shift, much more of how “do nematodes fit” in the desert system. And then – my Antarctic work, with Ross, started out as the two of us, because that’s what we wrote the proposal for, to kind of – “Is there more than just bacteria in the Dry Valleys?” as basically the question. And we thought that nematodes should be there, because they survive. They have amazing survival capabilities.

So the first two years we had a grant, it was just the two of us publishing. But as we started looking at that ecosystem – and in parallel we were working in dry ecosystems with a lot of different disciplines, hot desert ecosystems with a lot of different experts in other disciplines. When the LTER (the Long Term Ecological Research project) started, or when Bob Wharton was thinking about starting or applying for the NSF Long Term Ecological Research program in the Dry Valleys with a number of different disciplines, that was a huge transition for Antarctic terrestrial research, I think.

And the first time, it failed when they put the proposal in. They did not get the grant. I wasn’t on that first one. And Bob invited me and Cathy Tate, who was a stream ecologist, to come to a meeting in Bozeman where they – the original writers of the first proposal were gonna review and consider why didn’t they get it. Would we help critique it? And Cathy Tate knew ecosystems, grassland ecosystems, and I knew arid hot ecosystems, and so we came in and we started saying well, this reads as a lot of individual people doing their own research, but not really collaborating with each other to say, this is what they found, or isn’t this amazing, do you see that in your lake, or in your melt streams, or... It just didn’t seem like it was an ecosystem approach.

And it was shortly thereafter that Bob called both of us – she was in Boulder and I was still at Riverside at the time – and said, you’ve been doing, Diana you’ve been doing your own grant research with Ross, but have you considered being part of the LTER? And so I went in with them, and so did Cathy, on the very first LTER project, and Diane McKnight had been on it. But what was immediately obvious was that they were gonna work from these different disciplines to help each of us understand our research better. Our research area grew because – you know, even looking as of last year, it was growing because there are people who have expertise in different areas. And then we also published. So, there may be anywhere from five to ten names on a paper. And I think they’re pretty much all equal. Everyone is contributing their knowledge to an intersection of what we see going on in the Dry Valleys, how is it responding to climate change and warming events. The lake levels rise well, we need new expertise brought in to contribute to learning about how this cold desert system will respond.

So it’s a – I think it’s a – I’m not saying that individual research isn’t dynamic, but I think the transition from the way I was taught, and then the transition as a postdoc, and maybe the first few years of being criticized for “you publish with too many people,” as I started moving into this, has become “how can you do research without collaborating? There’s so much knowledge out there.” So I see much more interest by even the graduate students who go to Antarctica with me, to ask a person who’s got a different discipline, “well, what do you do?” and “can I see some of your papers?” – even though it may be way out of their window of knowledge.

Seag:

Have you seen also in that time and with this growth in collaborative research a change in the dynamics between PIs and grad students, in who it is that’s doing the fieldwork?

Wall:

Well, I think some of that has to do with age [laughs], I’m not myself as agile as I used to be, but I also think there’s an equal ownership all around. And here’s what I think the difference of it is in the Antarctic: it is also a team approach in that PIs want their students to know everything they know, in case one of ‘em breaks a leg. So, we want not to have zero-point failure; we want to have, you know, like three layers behind that, so that a field season is not lost.

So, you may call it, instead of zero-point failure, we’ve got a plan A, we’ve got a plan B, plan C for every day. If one of my students was to break a leg, I should know enough about what they are doing, their experiment – to help them get their samples or get ‘em run or whatever. If somebody catches the flu and they can’t go to the field, we’ve gotta have that backup. So it’s – it still is knowing enough about your – what we call a soil team, for example, that I can help somebody who is a PI on the soil team from a different university, and that we can explain it to somebody who’s in the water team, or the lake team.

Seag:

And you mentioned earlier, I wonder if you’d mind reiterating or reflecting on the idea that this more collaborative, larger team approach also has an impact on people’s ability to take care of their responsibilities outside of work, work-life balance and family care, that sort of thing.

Wall:

Yes. I think, you know, that it’s... there is an advantage in that. I have no data on it, but it seems to me that if you’re a member of a team – say you’re an early career person and there’s three of you on a team, and you’ve got three field seasons. Everybody is – again, it’s the team approach. Everybody’s dependent on everybody else. You know, one person can’t go in and get that done. You’ve gotta have this team approach to everything from “should we sample here, or look at that rock, or take our measurement here?” And so you’re interdependent; you work very closely together.

As you start to have a family, there are huge constraints on field work during the university school year and holiday season, because we have a very limited Austral summer season and the weather is not consistent. And it’s limited not only because it’s polar, but because of how the access is: there’s only a certain time we can go, say when the streams are running; or there’s only a certain time when the glacial streams are running, if you’re a glacier cryosphere type person.

And so this planning goes broader into your personal life as to, “wow, is this really the best time for me to go down, when I’ve got kids that are needing me this Christmas?” You go into a period of, “wow, I’d really like to be back before Christmas,” or “how will my family feel if I’m gone over the Christmas-New Year’s holidays.” And I think that goes inherently in everybody, but for people who are thinking about making – particularly women who are thinking about making Antarctica – a career, you know – it’s got to be in the forefront of their minds. So again Plan A and B kick in as options: can a student or post doc or colleague lead the soil team, or stream team for example so the scientist has a holiday at home.

Seag:

And the last question, I see we’re nearly at time, is, do you have any thoughts on the changing nature of international collaboration since you began your career?

Wall:

Ah, yes, the changing nature of collaborations internationally. I think we have always done it – well, let me backup. I would say that when we first got down to the ice, we were crazy to talk to other people, no matter where they were from, just to absorb as fast as possible everything they knew – including the practical, logistical knowledge. If we knew someone who was publishing papers on a topic we needed to know about, and they happened to be say at nearby New Zealand Scott Base, I wanted to get over there and meet them, and hear what they had to say, and get some advice, and... I think that sharing knowledge is pretty critical. I think now, we’ve got very similar global challenges affecting Antarctica and the planet that we (all international scientists – those at the Korean base, or the Italian base, New Zealand, British bases) recognize and I think the collaborations on and off the ice have even become greater.

Antarctica is for science, and nations agreed to that with the Antarctic Treaty. Today I know a lot more because it – the Treaty – affects us all and tourists and what we do on the continent or oceans or globally as scientists. I think my students are a lot more aware of the importance of the Treaty to all peoples than I was when I started. I was much more focusing on a scientist-to-scientist basis, and you know, a terrestrial-ecosystem-person-to-a-terrestrial-ecosystem-person. But I think now we are much more aware of what the global issues are there, that are global issues in, say, Fort Collins. We see ‘em – the changes in our ecosystems – faster. I think we see the melt faster, the changes in the biota not doing exactly what we thought they’d do with climate change, and so there’s a lot of new things to learn with climate change. I don’t know if that gets at your answer, but I’m also seeing more collaborative interdisciplinary papers. For example, some of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research meetings have been phenomenal in that there are ocean, terrestrial, ice people all coming together and saying “what are you seeing as the major change?” And they’re all very similar in wanting good data and to learn from each other.

Seag:

That’s fascinating. Thank you so much for meeting with me. I hope we’ll meet in Davos.

Wall:

Yes, I hope so! Yes!

[End of Interview]