2006-2007 - The Field Museum

2006 thanks to a bequest from Isabelle Bass, who, with her husband Robert, had a historic commitment
to bringing visiting scientists at the Field. The new bequest established a Robert O. Bass Fellowship for
New Researchers that will provide support for advanced graduate students and early-career
professionals.
Resident postdoctoral scientists enrich the vitality of research at an institution like ours, and National
Science Foundation-funded postdocs have long been a steady presence in Collections and Research. In
2006, due to the success of our curatorial faculty in grant writing and attracting top-notch talent, there
were eight NSF-funded full-time postdoctoral positions in Collections and Research. The past few years
have also seen an infusion of new funds from private individuals for support of postdoctoral positions.
The latest example came in 2006 with the creation of the Bucksbaum Young Scientist Fund with a gift
from Matt and Kay Bucksbaum, which is supporting Sushma Reddy, a Postdoctoral Scientist working with
Associate Curator of Birds Shannon Hackett on “Early Bird,” an NSF-funded project aimed at resolving
the evolutionary tree of life for all major lineages of birds. Sushma, an expert on the systematics and
biogeography of Asian birds, has been analyzing a massive set of DNA data for this international
collaborative effort, and the Bucksbaum support enables her to maintain her progress on the project.
The Bucksbaum Fellowship marks the latest Museum postdoctoral program, beginning with the Boyd
Fellowship in 2000, (funded by multiple donors in honor of former Field Museum President Sandy Boyd),
the John Caldwell Meeker Fellowship in paleontology, established in 2003 with a gift from faithful Geology
Department supporter Withrow C. Meeker, and the creation in 2005 of the Brown Fellowship in Mammals,
thanks to a gift from Barbara E. and Roger O. Brown, long-time friends of the Zoology Department. Such
investments in the development of beginning professional scientists have immeasurable payoffs for the
scientists themselves, and the fields they work in, but also for the Museum. In collaborating with their
curatorial supervisors, the postdocs raise the research profile of the Museum, enrich its intellectual
capital, and keep its science vibrant.
Inevitably, much of the preceding discussion of training and grants involved fieldwork and
collections. As one of our colleagues is fond of saying, “It all goes back to the collections”—“collectionsbased
research” is what we do. We practice conservation biology in partnership with NGOs, we teach at
universities, we train overseas colleagues in molecular techniques, but at the end of the day, we are also
a museum. Our very first objects were assembled to educate the fairgoers of 1893; to this core over the
past 113 years we have added millions of specimens, partly to further that public education mission, but
primarily to fuel the research that expands our knowledge of the world. The collections reached almost
24 million specimens in 2006, with hundreds more added to the databases each day.
The bulk of this growth is the result of the thousands of new specimens brought back to the Museum from
the field each year by our curators—but we frequently benefit from decades of collecting done by other
institutions or individuals. Returning from fieldwork in south Florida last summer, Curator Rüdiger Bieler
(Zoology/Invertebrates) picked up an orphaned land snail collection in South Carolina that is now being
integrated into our Invertebrate collection. The collection of approximately 1,500 series and large
numbers of anatomical slide preparations belonged to the late Glenn Webb, a college professor, wellknown
molluscan anatomist, and editor of the journal Gastropodia. The specimens include primary type
material, and will become a most valuable addition to our already outstanding collection of North
American mollusks. Similarly, the Division of Mammals (Zoology) received a portion of an orphaned
research collection from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during the year. In total, Larry
Heaney (Curator of Mammals) and Michi Schulenberg (Assistant Collection Manager) brought some
4,000 specimens from this collection back to the Field, including specimens from Africa, Asia, Canada,
and the eastern U.S. The collection nicely complements our existing North American material, and
includes especially valuable material from the Philippines and Kenya. Collections Manager Dan
Summers and Assistant Collections Manager Jim Boone (both Zoology/Insects) traveled to Chico,
California in late October to pick up collections of worldwide moths and butterflies (4,500 beautifully
prepared specimens representing 925 species), and staphylinid beetles (5,000 specimens, containing 83
species, including 48 holotypes), both from David Kistner (California State University, Chico). David
Kistner is also a Research Associate in Zoology’s Division of Insects.
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