We're at Mountain Lake Biological Station, University of Virginia's
residential field station. We're sitting at about 4,000 feet at the top of Salt
Pond Mountain. I teach at UVA during the academic year and as soon as classes are
out in the spring, I come up here and I facilitate the classes and research here.
I get to basically run a summer camp for bio geeks,
where I get to convince people to come up, play in the woods learn about plants,
animals, organisms and learn how to critically think and become researchers
in their own right. The students who get to take those classes are really out in
the field with a faculty member, eight, nine hours a day for three or four weeks.
Students can get their hands dirty and learn about organisms in their natural habitats.
The primary work that I do up here is looking at social network evolution.
What we're trying to do is understand how social connections drive evolution.
We use this beetle called the forked fungus beetle to test ideas about social networks .
So if you come out at night, what you'll find on one of these
brackets is basically like the night club, it's the place where all the
happenin' activity goes on. I get to come and spend hours in the
woods asking interesting questions about animals and behavior and trying to
puzzle out how evolution works.
The concept of an Academical village is that
intellectuals, teachers, students work and play together. And we really live that
motto here. Every student that works in my lab came to my lab because they were
up here, it is a place where you cannot escape that connection of individual
interaction that really inspires students to get involved in the research
at a core level.