 What do you do at the Museum?
I've got my fingers in a number of different pies, but they nearly all involve research on rove beetles -- the family Staphylinidae. It's one of the biggest families of beetles in the world, with more than 45,000 species described so far. I also help care for the insect collection, advise students, and participate in some educational programs and exhibit development.
I've worked for a number of years on one group of rove beetle subfamilies, trying to understand their systematics and the evolutionary relationships among them. I'm particularly interested in the ones that live near the southern end of the world, in Australia, New Zealand, southern South America, and, to a lesser extent, South Africa.
There's still lots of basic information lacking about the rove beetles down there (and many genera and species new to science waiting to be described). My overall aim is to look at individual genera, analyze the relationships within each genus, see what patterns of biogeographical relationships they show, and compare these patterns to those of other rove beetles, animals, and plants to explore the evolution of southern biotas.
I'm also interested in the evolution of rove beetles more generally, including how feeding habits have changed within the family as different subgroups of them evolved. There are enough unanswered questions to keep me and other workers busy for a long time!
 How did you get interested in your field?
My father, though he was a biochemist by training, had a life-long interest in natural history, picked up from his parents. My mother also enjoys the outdoors, and learned a lot about edible plants and berries from her mother. When I was growing up, we went camping and walked in the woods locally and things like that, and I got interested in the natural world.
By the time I started college, I'd been interested in biology for many years, but hadn't narrowed down my interests enough to choose a career path. I started learning a little about insects my senior year, after hearing about the entomology course a friend at Harvard took there. After graduating, I looked for a job and wound up working in the entomology department of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, mounting and labeling little tiny beetles that lived in fungi.
When I heard of the museum job, it sounded like a nice chance to learn more about insects and see if that was the direction I wanted to go. Within two weeks, I was hooked on beetles for life! I worked my way up for about seven years there, simultaneously learning about entomology and starting to do my own research on beetles. Then I became a graduate student at Harvard and finished my Ph.D. five years later.
What do you love about what you do?
I love the chance to discover new information and investigate new places; the latter means fieldwork. One thing you simply can't do by looking at specimens in the museum is find out what different beetles do for a living, or exactly where they are in their habitat, or things like that. Sometimes you can get a little of this kind of information from museum specimens, but you really have to get out in the field to explore in detail.
An exciting discovery I made in the field concerned a very odd rove beetle from Chile and Argentina. It's a really strange looking one, very anomalous for the family, but many features make it clearly a rove beetle. Only a few specimens were in museums, and absolutely nothing was known about its biology -- I wanted to figure out what it does.
While in the field in Chile, I found some of these beetles on the underside of a leaf as it was getting dark one day. It turned out there were a lot of them on the vegetation. That's pretty strange for rove beetles, since most of them live in leaf litter, on fungi, under the bark of logs, or places like that.
We preserved some, and later I studied the specimens under the microscope. In their guts I found numerous fungal spores and tiny fungi that grow on leaves. Evidently these beetles walk around on the leaves and scrape off little fungi with their mouthparts, which seem to be specialized for doing so. This is a really different way of life from other rove beetles, most of which are predators. The adults look very different from what seem to be their closest relatives, and probably have been evolving separately from those for a long time. I still don't know how they came to look as they do or what their larvae look like or feed on.
Without fieldwork and the chance to see, collect, and study all those specimens, I couldn't have figured out much of anything about this species' biology. At the same time, I also enjoy using a variety of high-tech tools like computers, microscopes, and the scanning electron microscope (SEM) to learn more about "my" beetles and to publish my findings and share information with others.
Have you ever encountered any gender barriers over the course of your career?
Not obvious ones. I was lucky enough to have a very supportive family: I don't remember my parents ever suggesting there was anything I couldn't do just because I was a girl (and that was in the 1950s and '60s). For example, when I was four, lightning hit our chimney and some firemen came to check it out. For the next year or two, I wanted to be a fireman, and nobody ever told me I couldn't even though there were few, if any, female firefighters in 1956. My parents always encouraged me to pursue whatever career I wanted. This probably helped me go ahead in science in, say, junior high and high school, and not worry about being unusual. My high school physics teacher very consciously encouraged my interest in biology and in science in general. My husband, also an entomologist here at The Field Museum, has always supported my research interests very strongly.
What gender issues do you see in science in general?
Women are certainly still drastically underrepresented in science. I think various factors have contributed to this situation, from social pressure against girls getting into science at all, to career path norms in science that are difficult to reconcile with child-bearing and rearing, to lingering prejudices about women's commitment and/or ability to "do science." These pressures are being re-examined in many places, though, and things are changing. The gender imbalance is very strong in entomology, and even more so in the areas of entomology I work in, systematics and evolutionary studies. Gradually, though, there are more women being trained in these fields, too.
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