Dr. Greg Thorn and Dr. Silke Nebel

 

FEATURED FACULTY/POSTDOC

FEATURED FACULTY: Dr. Greg Thorn

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Dr. Greg Thorn is almost as local as you can get. “I grew up in London, my father worked on campus here with Agriculture Canada [which used to be based on the UWO main campus].” “Becoming a naturalist was something that simply happened – there is a very good field naturalists club [the McIlwraith Field Naturalists, now Nature London] so I learned a lot from them, and my family travelled far and wide to National Parks all over North America during the summers, which led to my wanting to be a park naturalist.” Dr. Thorn’s specialty is systematics, the classification of living organisms, and it seems that he was practicing those skills early - on these summer trips “my brother and sister and I used to compete to have the best collection of, say, leaves of Canadian trees, and one thing I still remember is keying out grasses after my godfather sent me a two volume book ‘Grasses of the United States’ for my 10 th birthday”.

Dr. Thorn moved to Guelph to study landscape architecture which “at the time was more focused on design and engineering than biology, except for a course called ‘Botany for Agriculture majors’, and another on ‘woody plants’.” However, Dr. Thorn got his nature fix each summer, working as a naturalist at Algonquin Provincial Park, where he “worked with lots of really good entomologists, botanists, and birders” and was thrust into leading mushroom hikes. “I got in touch with George Barron, a famous mycologist at Guelph, and he was very supportive, providing books, film, and microscopy supplies, and saying ‘Go to it!’” This connection proved life changing when, after graduating “I was working as a landscaper in Vancouver and George phoned me up and asked if I would like to travel around Eastern North America taking photos of fungi for a guidebook. It was too good an opportunity to pass up.”

The guidebook took nearly twenty years to come out “and in the end only a few of my pictures were in it” says Dr. Thorn, but the experience led to his enrolling in an MSc at Guelph, and eventually PhD studies at the University of Toronto where Dr. Thorn studied the physiology of wood decay fungi as a way to classify them. This was followed by stints as a postdoc in Japan and at Michigan State University, and (after he met his wife-to-be Nina, now a Visiting Scientist in the Biology Department at Western) five years at the University of Wyoming “where I taught, wrote grant proposals, did science and applied for faculty positions from Newfoundland to Alaska and California to Florida. I never in my wildest dreams thought I’d end up back in London!” says Dr. Thorn.

Dr. Thorn has now been a professor at Western for 11 years, and his research is focussed on a simple question: “we know that fungi are really important; I want to know what they do.” To answer this question, Dr. Thorn uses modern molecular biology techniques to identify and separate mushroom species. “In particular, I want to know if disturbance has an effect on the fungi out in the environment.”

Dr. Thorn is currently recruiting graduate students, and encourages prospective students to contact him ... especially if they are interested in mushrooms! You can read more about Dr. Thorn’s research on his website: http://publish.uwo.ca/~rgthorn/.

Questions for Dr. Greg Thorn:

When I was growing up, I wanted, at various points, to be a high school math teacher (now that’s ironic) or a park naturalist. Definitely not a biologist, because they become far too specialized.  That’s why my undergraduate degree was in Landscape Architecture.
 
My favourite organism, hmm.  That’s a tough call.  While I was a postdoc at the Tottori Mycological Institute, a young scientist there asked me “Do you like birds more than fungi?” since I was always going off on weekend trips with the local bird-watching club.  I probably don’t have a favourite organism, but I was really impressed when I saw my first onychophoran (“velvet worm”) with Nina in Costa Rica, especially when it squirted me with its slime organs.  A year later we were married (Nina and I, not the onychophoran).

My first publication was a list of mushrooms collected in Algonquin Park, Ontario (published in le Naturaliste canadien).  I typed the manuscript on a manual typewriter in my apartment in Vancouver, while I was working as a landscaper during the day.  Lots of white-out was required. OK, there was an earlier publication, “The Alhambra, Generalife, and the White-headed Duck”, which I wrote for a landscape architecture journal during my undergraduate days, but I lost track of the citation and a Google search yields no hits!  I guess it really was not memorable.
 
My favourite piece of research was about carnivorous mushrooms (my second paper, published in Science), which was a tangent from my master’s work with George Barron.  Mushrooms of the genus Pleurotus were not supposed to consume nematodes and, being commercially cultivated, they were thought to be well known, but neither of those proved true.  It is worth doubting commonly held views.  Nearly thirty years later, our speculation about the possible biological importance of the phenomenon remains untested.
 
Biology at Western is fun.  Yes, there are not-so-fun aspects to the job, but one only has to remember some of the alternative lives that are out there in order to forget those dreary bits.  Working with students, with great colleagues, with excellent facilities, and having the opportunity to study fungi in the field and lab, all make the job incredibly rewarding.

FEATURED POSTDOC: Dr. Silke Nebel

Visit Dr.Nebel's website

When Dr. Silke Nebel, based at the Advanced Facility for Avian Research (AFAR), finished high school in Germany, she really wanted to work in conservation. Ten weeks as a volunteer at bird reserves in Scotland sealed the deal that she would be working on birds. “I think it could have been anything, plants, insects, or mammals” she says, “but I was exposed to birds, and that set me on a track”. That track included becoming friends with ‘birders’ as an undergraduate – “I spent a lot of time compiling lists of birds, to see how many birds we could see in a day or in a new country”, and eventually led her to Senegal. “I wanted to learn how to handle birds, so when I was 19 I volunteered as a cook on a British research expedition. That was where I first got to band birds” Silke recalls: “it’s probably the most exciting thing I’ve ever done!”

Volunteering in other people’s research was also how Silke got involved in her own first research project. In Germany, the undergraduate Diploma is a five year degree with a big research project at the end. Silke explains how a friend in the Netherlands encouraged her to go to the island of Texel to help out a research group. “It was the middle of winter, the Wadden Sea was completely frozen and we were pulling up frozen sediment to see what food was there in winter. There were almost no birds at all!” However, Silke did like the group and their research (“migration seemed like an excellent research topic to promote travelling”), so she asked to go back for her thesis research. “I didn’t realise at the time that the head of the group [Theuris Piersma] was pretty famous. I probably wouldn’t have been brave enough to ask if I had!” she laughs. That project led to more travelling, this time to British Columbia, which led to a PhD at Simon Fraser University, this time on Western Sandpipers.

At Simon Fraser, Silke also met her spouse, and followed him to Australia where he did a Postdoc. “I didn’t have a job, I didn’t know anybody, and my papers from my PhD got rejected!” Silke says of her first year there. “But then I found the right group, I was a good fit, and I got to continue my work on migrating birds. I also got the papers published” she laughs. Moving to London was almost the opposite experience. “I already knew Chris Guglielmo [Silke’s postdoc advisor at AFAR], and [Biology Professor] Yolanda Morbey and I were in the same lab as graduate students.” In addition, the facilities of AFAR were a perfect fit for her interests and expertise. “I am interested in how birds trade off their ability to fight infection with their performance on these long distance migrations, and it gives me an opportunity to interact with many of the projects in AFAR.” Recently, Silke has been keeping Western Sandpipers in a room specially designed for waders “the floor is on a slope with running water in the middle, so it is like they have a little beach at one end”, and the moment of truth will come later in the summer when she will try to fly them in the wind tunnel.

To read more about the research at AFAR, visit their website http://birds.uwo.ca/AFAR/Welcome.html .

Some Questions for Dr. Nebel:

When I was growing up, I wanted ... To be a musician. Ideally, an opera singer, but I knew that wasn’t going to happen, so I aimed for flautist instead (symphony orchestra, not the kind giving lessons). When that didn’t happen, I settled on biology. It seemed to hold the promise of going to far-away exciting places. Now I do music on the side, which seems to be the better arrangement anyhow.

 My favourite organism is... A sandpiper. I think part of the attraction is the fact that they migrate across the entire globe. And then back again.

My first publication was about ... The interaction between diet and stomach size in red knots (a kind of sandpiper). Red knots eat hard-shelled bivalves, such as cockles, and as they don’t have teeth, they revert to cracking the shells with their gizzards. I still think that’s pretty cool. And we showed that the birds with the thickest gizzards selected the highest proportion of hard-shelled bivalves in their diets. We used a portable ultra-sound to measure stomach-thickness in the field – you let the birds go afterwards, unharmed. Fun times!

My favourite piece of research was ... Detecting a strong north-south cline in sex ratios in western sandpipers – we showed that from British Columbia to Peru, the proportion of females during the non-breeding season increased the further south you go. It made for a nice large-scale graph that was immediately intuitive to anybody looking at it. To this day I like continental-scale research projects.

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This page was last updated on October 18, 2011
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