Associate Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Program in the Environment; DEI Chair for the EARTH Department
Principal Investigator at the Plant Evolution, Paleobotany, and Paleoecology Research (PEPPR) Lab
Please note that this interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
To get started, can you share how you decided to pursue plant evolution and paleontology, as well as how you ended up at the University of Michigan?
Dr. Selena Smith: I guess I was always interested in paleontology. I grew up in Alberta, which is well known for its fossils and its dinosaurs and stuff. But in high school, I did the International Baccalaureate program, so we had to do an extended essay, and my high school teacher called up the university to see if there was somebody there who could supervise me. And I’d had that moment trying to figure out what I wanted to do for that project, of realizing that I wanted to study plants instead of animals, which, looking back, kind of makes sense. I grew up in a rural area, on three acres of forest, and was always out gardening and learning about the plants and kind of how we can use them and their names and stuff. So yeah, and just the longer I do it, the more I fall in love with plants. I still really like fossils, but as I do it more, it’s like the plants themselves have become more of a focal part of my research and my time. So yes, I ended up here after a postdoc in the UK, and my now-husband got a job here, so I followed him here and did Michigan Society of Fellows and some lecturing for Program in the Environment, and then managed to switch to a tenure track position.
What research is your lab, the PEPPR lab, currently focused on?
Dr. Smith: Yeah, so the acronym was a joint effort from my first grad students and undergrads. So we came up with that together, and it summarizes what we do in plant evolution and paleoecology. And so the fossil plants are usually kind of the driver and motivation, but we end up looking at a lot of living plants as well. We are looking at relationships, which include the relationships between plants themselves. So there are the extinct ones you get as fossils and their living relatives, and you know how they’re related to each other. We also spend time looking at the relationships between plants and their environment, how the environment will affect plant physiology and plant morphology, and how they respond to that. But also, I’m fascinated by how plants also affect the environment, so you get these interactions going both ways. And then, more recently, looking at plants and their relationship with people. And that’s something that I’ve always been interested in. And so, one of the classes I teach is Plants and People, and the wild rice project is starting to move some of the research in that direction also. So the lab works on a whole bunch of different things, and I like to get students engaged in projects that relate to their interests and not just my own, even though grants and stuff have to drive some of it. But yeah, we usually have several grad students and lots of undergrads, and then in the last few summers, we’ve had some high school students, as well.
How do you see your research changing in the next 5 to 10 years?
Dr. Smith: That’s a good question. So we just came back from fieldwork in Antarctica earlier this year, and so I think some of it will be focusing more on all of that material because it’s amazing, beautiful fossils. So I will switch a little bit back to my roots of more anatomy and systematics, which will be fun, but I’m also hoping that we’ll maintain some of the more modern and locally relevant fieldwork and research. So the kind of thinking about different ways, especially to bring together Indigenous knowledge and Western science to make our ecosystems and our ways of life better.
How do you see climate change affecting your research in the next 10 years?
Dr. Smith: I think people see the relevance of the fossil plants a lot more because they’re showing us this window into the past. During these climatologically and ecologically different time periods, it’s natural experiments where we can see on much longer time scales than we’ve experienced, how the plants and the ecosystems are responding. Especially since the plants can’t move and they’re the foundations of all of our terrestrial ecosystems, what they’re doing is really important, and they also record a lot of climate signals. So I’ve seen a lot more interest in using the plant fossils to get at what past climate has done, so that’s been a big change. I think for more local stuff, that’s certainly something that has come up a lot with thinking about wild rice and what its future is, and a lot of our ecosystems, not just climate change, but also land use and water use, it’s all linked together, and what’s going to happen to those ecosystems is pretty concerning.
What do you see as labs’ role in communicating what you’re learning with the university and local government groups?
Dr. Smith: Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it certainly varies a lot, but I think a lot of people in the department now see the importance of us trying to communicate the relevance of our science. It kind of depends on our specific fields and what we’re doing. So sometimes that’s a little more direct in terms of communicating with policymakers. Sometimes that’s maybe more indirect. But I think we all recognize that. And it can be hard. Luckily, we have great students, like one of my recent PhD students who graduated in May – science policy is what he wanted to do. So he’s in a federal position now, able to do that with a background of fossil plants and climate change, so I think there are other things that we can do to, again, support students to get those experiences and think about outreach better than some of us do.
What advice do you have for other educators in the sustainability space?
Dr. Smith: I think one of the things that we’ve been thinking about lately is just kind of how to stay optimistic about it, and I think that’s just one of the things to try and keep in mind is not to focus too much on what’s wrong, but to focus on what we can do and how much progress we have made and that we are learning. And you know, some steps are being taken forward, and I think making sure we can highlight that to students, whether they’re conducting independent research, lab students, or in classes, I think doing that is important. Also, I think this goes along with highlighting the diversity of people who are doing this work, and it’s not just certain segments of the population. I’ve been on the DEI committee for the department for a while, and I think it’s important to point out how much knowledge there is that we could leverage, and we have success stories to be inspired by.
How did you end up as the DEI Chair of the Earth department, what have you done in the role, and why is it important to you?
Dr. Smith: I think part of it is that it’s just unfathomable to me that we don’t treat everyone the same, and I guess I’m also a little sensitive as somebody with a lot of maybe less visible diversity. I’m a foreigner – I’m Canadian, but people won’t see that I have Indigenous heritage. My dad is Metis, and I’m a Metis citizen of Ontario, but I don’t look Indigenous, so I have the privilege of being white-passing. So I think part of what drives me is just wanting everyone to have chances and seeing how unfair and systematic it is. We’re facing some really big challenges as a society with climate change and the environment, and if we don’t have everybody on board, if we’re not thinking of pulling up the people who are in the worst position, then we aren’t going to solve it. So we need everybody, and we need all these different perspectives. You know, it’s the people who are living closest to the land who see a lot of the problems, and then they don’t get listened to. But they’re the ones who will know the most about what might need to be done. So, I think that’s a lot of what drives me.
What is something that you wish people knew right now from your research?
Dr. Smith: This doesn’t come directly from my research, but I want people to know that plants are resilient. This is what I always tell my classes, too: the world will be fine with climate change. We know ecosystems have gone through bad changes and recovered, but it’s our quality of life that we’re fighting for – that’s what we need to be worried about. Plants are just amazing in their diversity and all the different ways they do things, and they come up with different solutions to the same problems. One of the things we’ve been looking at is venation in a group of plants that doesn’t always get studied, and they have a different way of doing it, but they’re still a successful group of plants. And this comes back to the DEI stuff too. We don’t all have to be doing the same thing. It’s that diversity that makes us stronger, and the plants show that. We see that through the fossil record. We see that in modern experiments.
As a part of the Year of Sustainability, we are interested in sharing, uplifting, and highlighting stories about the people who make up LSA and have experience researching sustainability. We sat down with a series of LSA faculty to discuss their background and work and will feature these conversations in our Faculty Spotlight series.
To contact the LSA Year of Sustainability Team, please contact sustainable-lsa@umich.edu.
