Floating face-down in a cold lake on a rainy morning: it's just another day at the lab for Dan Bolnick and his research assistants. The lab, in this case, is a patchwork of lakes, streams, and estuaries on British Columbia's Vancouver Island.

Like Darwin studying the finches of the Galapagos, Bolnick works with three-spined sticklebacks. For the past 10 summers, he's prowled the island, investigating the sardine-sized fish's evolutionary dynamics. Sequestered in “dozens and dozens and dozens” of closely spaced bodies of water, he says, individual stickleback populations developed distinctive, coevolutionary relationships with an assortment of tiny tapeworms, nematodes, and other local parasites.

Understanding whether this constantly shifting dynamic involves genetic changes in stickleback immune systems, he says, could help us combat parasitic diseases in humans.

		Stickleback Summers Pictures of Bolnick's annual trips to British Columbia.

Bolnick is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Texas at Austin. A recently appointed HHMI early career scientist, he's one of 50 academics chosen for their bold, potentially transformative research. He's also interested in training next-generation scientists. “When I look for research assistants, I try to recruit future science teachers, K through 12. If they can see what research is really about, they can spread some of that excitement to their students.”

That excitement is no empty promise. Bolnick's summertime range is a swath of rain forest with a spectacular mountain backdrop, home to cougars, bears, and leeches. Field work here involves skills more common among Eagle Scouts than education majors.

Photo: Matthew Rainwaters

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