Sam
They/Them
I am queer, genderqueer, transgender and I am a PhD candidate in evolutionary biology.//
I fell in love with science through pursuing my insatiable curiosity about the world around me, flipping over rocks to look for salamanders and cataloging the texture of different leaves in my backyard. As a biology major in college, I decided to commit myself to studying plants because of their incredible plasticity, resilience, and generosity in the face of stress, disturbance, and environmental change. My graduate work focuses on local adaptation to environmental stress in a widely distributed species of wild grass. Through studying ecological variation, I’ve come to see myself as more deeply a part of our world’s incredible biodiversity as someone who is other, neither, and both male and female. In addition to my research in the lab on plant adaptation, I’ve developed presentations and resources about incorporating the wide diversity of sex, gender, and sexuality across taxa into biology classrooms and curricula. I want to use my positionality as a queer and transgender scientist to help my queer, trans, and intersex community understand themselves and our identities as a fundamental, natural, and valid component of human biological diversity, and to help other scientists make their research, science communication, and curricula more inclusive and accessible.
Twitter: @PlantRoleModels