Dr. Chris Hardy

This edition of Who Makes Millersville Special features Dr. Chris Hardy, associate professor of biology.

 

 

Q: How did you come up with the idea for “Doug Fir’s Christmas Tree Guide?”

A: I’m always looking for more effective means of conveying the beauty, botany and far-reaching utility of plants to the world. Christmas trees are a phenomenal element of our culture, yet there haven’t been any definitive guides available in digital media (or print, for that matter) before Doug Fir came along. As for the Doug Fir character in the guide, he is the personification the one of the most popular trees, the Douglas-fir, and he adds a playful face to the guide. His name was born out of the biological banter often exchanged between myself and my colleague in biology, Dr. John Wallace. One of our running lines of amusement that John initiated is how insiders in the forestry professions and Christmas tree industry often refer to the Douglas-fir simply as “Doug-fir.” I’ll add here that Doug has a brother, Fraser, who does not appear in the guide, although his species is certainly profiled.

Q. What role did your wife, Dr. Nazli Hardy, play in the 2014 edition of the “Doug Fir’s Christmas Tree Guide?”

A: Alumnus Joe Marks ’12 and I developed Doug Fir as an Android app in 2012 and released version 2.0 last year. Nazli and I, however, have a long-standing collaborative program of scholarship in the area of biodiversity informatics, which is the field concerned with developing tools to increase the collection of, and access to, information about biodiversity. For this 2014 release of the Guide, we developed a companion website (www.natureatlas.org/christmastree/) that expands access beyond that of smartphone owners. The larger format of the website also enabled us to develop the first-of-its-kind Christmas Tree Explorer^TM, not present in the app, which represents a major advance that allows tree shoppers to interactively explore and select trees based on what shoppers find desirable in their trees.

 Q. What has changed from last year’s version of the Christmas Tree Guide?

A: The app has not changed, but the website is new. The big advance is that the website brings the guide to more than just owners of smartphones.

Q. What type of Christmas tree do you and Nazli plan to buy this year?

A: She and I both love the Fraser fir because of its excellent, slender form and small footprint in the home. However, development of this guide has reminded us that the diverse world of Christmas trees is too rich to settle on just one, and so we plan to mixed it up a bit from year to year.

 Q: What is your educational background?

A: I have an associate degree in art from Catonsville Community College, a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Maryland and a doctorate degree in plant biology from Cornell University.

Q: When did you know you wanted to go into the field of biology?

A: I always loved climbing trees and exploring the forest as a kid, but I also loved art. I was better at art than science back then, so I initially chose a path in art. Eventually, the lure of the forests was too great and I made the tough decision to leave art for studies in biology at Maryland. How delighted I was when, at Cornell, I figured out a way to climb trees in the rainforest and to use art to enrich my botanical pursuits, such as the discovery and description of new plant species.

Q: How long have you been teaching at Millersville?

A: For nearly 10 years. 

Q: What classes do you teach?

A: The courses I teach regularly are Foundations of Biology (101), Concepts of Botany (221) and Plant Systematics (325).

Q:  What class is your favorite class to teach and why?

A: Systematics is my favorite class, because it is the quiet giant and scaffold upon which all of biology rests. It is the discipline that gives the rest of the world its species, its concept of biodiversity and its understanding of the evolutionary history of life.

 Q: What is the hardest part about being a professor?

A: Multitasking.

Q: What does it mean to be the “Keeper of the Herbarium”?

A: I manage and curate the collection of some 15,000 preserved plant specimens that we call the James C. Parks Herbarium. These specimens date from the 1800s and are used in classes, taxonomic and floristic research by faculty, students and members of the public. You can learn more at http://herbarium.millersville.edu.

Q: What accomplishment in your professional career are you most proud of?

A: Delivering a good lecture and stimulating critical thinking in students makes me the proudest on a daily basis. More broadly, I am proud of my record of scholarly publication. It is satisfying to contribute to the body of botanical knowledge and, occasionally, to other fields. For example, I was humored recently to find that my theoretical work on ancestral state reconstruction was being applied by astrobiologists to their study of the evolution of microbial life and the prospect of that on other planets.

Q:  Are you actively doing any research or have any research projects coming up?

A: I am currently in the process of describing three species and subspecies of spiderwort from South America; I am near completion of a monograph of the spiderwort family in northeastern North America and am continually developing WikiPlantAtlas.org (and its child, NatureAtlas.org) and studying its use in undergraduate field biology courses. WikiPlantAtlas.org was created by my wife, Dr. Nazli Hardy (computer science), and me. Additionally, one of my students is conducting a study to discern the differences between the seeds of wild edible grapes and similar looking, yet inedible or toxic wild fruits. Doing so could help amateur naturalists make more informed choices about what to eat and not to eat in the wild. It could also aid forensic botanists in cases involving human poisonings caused by toxic berries mistaken for grapes. Some of my other students are conducting floristic inventories of nearby natural areas and one is conducting a comparative study of method for estimating tree heights.

Q: What is your favorite thing about Millersville?

A: It is the place where I met my super smart wife and have had two delightful kids.

Q: What do you think your students would be most surprised to know about you?

A: Oh, I don’t know. Perhaps that I played first base and outfield baseball for the 2004 Swiss National Champion Zurich Challengers and then returned to play for them in the 2005 EuroCup in Croatia in the summer after my first semester here. I have since hung up my spikes, but I remember thinking then that academics during the school year and international baseball during the summer would be a great life.

Q: What do you like to do to relax or have fun?

A: Having time to think and talk with my family.

Q:  What type of music do you listen to?

A: All kinds, really, but the most memorable recent release I’ve enjoyed was the soundtrack to the Bollywood film “Dhoom 3.” The fusion of styles in that music is mind-boggling.

Q: What is your biggest pet peeve?

A: My biggest pet peeve is letting something bother me.

Q: If you could meet anyone, living or deceased, who would it be and why?

A: Personally, it would be my wife’s late maternal grandparents in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Academically, it would be the late botanist Liberty Hyde Bailey. It was Bailey who forged a world-class and integrative botany program in the middle of nowhere in rural, upstate New York.

Q: Is there anything else you want to add?

A: Botany is irrefutably our past, present and future. Although societal and institutional prioritization of botany education has waned inappropriately in recent years, I know that botany at MU is helping to reverse that trend.