Previous

||

This Issue

||

Next

AROUND THE QUADS

5 Minutes with … Shahid Naeem

Shahid Naeem, chair of the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology (E3B), received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1989. He taught at the University of Minnesota and the University of Washington before coming to Columbia in 2003.

Where did you grow up?

I was born in San Francisco, but I grew up in Brooklyn.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be an astronaut … be involved with aviation or flying or something like that. Living in Brooklyn, in a relatively poor neighborhood, it seemed like it would be really cool to fly, to travel all over the world, and even to the moon.

How did you get interested in ecology?

That was much later. I was already a junior [at Berkeley] — a cell biology major — by the time I got interested in ecology. When you grow up in Brooklyn, I don’t think the environment is something that strikes you on a day-to-day basis. You see it on television … Nature was as distant as outer space.

What got me hooked on ecology was a class by a professor who made thinking about plants, animals and their environment much more interesting than anything I’d taken up till then. He was phenomenal. It made me realize the power that a professor can have.

What happened next?

I graduated with honors from Berkeley, but lost my interest in medical school. At the same time, the professor I was interested in [Robert Colwell] got a grant. I worked for him for the next three years. We went to Costa Rica, Dominica, St. Lucia, Trinidad, Mexico and Southern California, and we worked on hummingbirds, the flowers they pollinate and the mites that lived in the flowers. We’d get up at the crack of dawn in the middle of the jungle and set up these virtually invisible nets that catch hummingbirds in their folds. You then reach into the fold and you gently grab the bird and you pull it out and you have this living iridescent gem in your hand — they’re so tiny, and so warm. We were doing abstract research, but the experience … I’d never really experienced nature this way.

By the time the grant ran out, my professor said he thought I’d be a really great graduate student in ecology. If I was interested, he would let me join his lab.

How did you end up at Columbia?

In 2002, I got a call from Marina Cords, who was the chair of the department at the time. She told me that there was a job for a senior faculty member here. She said, “This is a new department. It’s just started.” I was hesitant, but she said, “Why don’t you come and check it out?”

The department was new and tiny, but it had 85 adjunct faculty in the American Museum of Natural History, New York Botanical Garden, the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Wildlife Trust — a museum, garden, zoo and NGO. They have state-of-the-art-labs and incredible research programs here and in more than 60 countries — and these people actually teach our classes!

The idea about coming to Columbia, being part of this extended family of cultural institutions and growing a department grew on me.

What’s new in your department?

We’re in the process of trying to recruit someone for a new professorship in sustainable development.

What are you working on right now?

I work in China, where we’re looking at how the diversity of the grassland vegetation is important to the herders who live in Inner Mongolia. We’re working with Chinese faculty — it’s a joint venture among Columbia, Arizona State and the Institute of Botany in China. We’re going to try to find out what’s the best kind of grassland for them to have, given that they want to increase the number of animals they have, because there’s more of a market for meat in China than there was before.

Are you married?

I’m married, but we don’t have kids. My spouse, Sara Tjossem, is a historian of science at SIPA.

Where do you live?

Right on Broadway.

Any pets?

A couple of indoor cats.

What have you been reading for pleasure?

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri.

If you could go anywhere in the world right now, where would it be?

Northern Scandinavia — polar bears, arctic vegetation. I think that habitat’s changing so fast, I’d love to see it before it’s gone.

What’s your favorite food?

Chinese food, in China.

Coffee or tea?

Espresso.

Your lab’s motto is “Ecology with No Apology.” Why?

Ecology … is smelly, dirty and involves a lot of messy and intricate ideas. It clashes with the pristine, sterile, high-tech feel that biology often has … but we’re not apologetic for that! I often say that our department is the voice of the 30 million other species. There’s more to the world than Drosophila and white mice.

Interview: Rose Kernochan ’82 Barnard
PHOTO: SARA TJOSSEM

Previous

||

This Issue

||

Next