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Victoria L. Sork—Recipient of the 2020 Molecular Ecology Prize

2020; Wiley; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/mec.15772

1365-294X

Luke Browne,

Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies

If you were to ask Victoria Sork at age 10 what she wanted to be when she grew up, the specificity of her answer might surprise you, and her ability to achieve that dream might inspire you. At the age of 10, Victoria knew she wanted to either be a math professor or scientist at UCLA, a position she now holds as a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Institute of the Environment & Sustainability at UCLA. However, her path to achieving her dream included obstacles, including overcoming a hostile and actively discouraging environment often experienced by girls and women in STEM. Despite these challenges, Victoria established herself as a leader in the field of molecular ecology, a pioneer in plant landscape genetics and genomics, a tireless advocate for diversity, inclusion, equity, and justice in STEM—and as the winner of the 2020 Molecular Ecology Prize. Victoria's formal training as a scientist began as an undergraduate in biological sciences at the University of California, Irvine with an interest in microbiology and genetics. Fortunate for the field of molecular ecology, two influential academic quarters of field biology inspired a passion for the natural world in Victoria and redirected her focus to ecology and evolution. She went on to complete an honors project under the guidance of Dick MacMillan on the ecology of desert rodents and plants in remote (at that time) sites in Southern California. During that time, Victoria also volunteered to tutor elementary school students in the barrios of Santa Ana and saw first-hand the inequities and injustices present in the American educational system, which would inspire a drive throughout her career to address those inequities and injustices. When applying for graduate school, Victoria was told that academia was not a place for women. She even encountered a prospective faculty advisor declaring that he did not accept women as graduate students in his lab. During her PhD at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor under the guidance of Deborah Rabinowitz, Victoria studied the ecology of seed dispersal by mammals, publishing a thesis entitled “Demographic Consequences of Mammalian Seed Dispersal for Pignut Hickory”. Also during her PhD, Victoria was as a graduate teaching assistant in the Women's Studies Program, gaining a further understanding of the reasons why women were excluded from STEM careers and an even stronger resolve to address it. Victoria became an assistant professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis in 1979, conducting research on tree populations both in the Missouri Ozark forests and the tropics in Panama. During this time, Victoria was also the founding director of the International Center for Tropical Ecology, helped establish the PhD program in biology, and took several influential research leaves that helped shape her career. Specifically, she traveled to the University of Chicago, the University of California, Berkeley, and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) in Santa Barbara. Her research focus during this time transitioned from a primarily ecological perspective to one that integrates technique and theory in both ecology and evolutionary biology, with the ultimate goal of translating this integrated approach into effective conservation and management. After ascending the ranks at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, Victoria moved to a faculty position at UCLA in 2001, where she remains today. Building from her early interest in the ecological impacts of dispersal (Sork & Boucher, 1977), Victoria has been at the leading edge of using genetic tools to understand how pollen and seed movement impact the genetic diversity and structure of plant populations (Smouse & Sork, 2004; Sork et al., 1999; Sork & Smouse, 2006). A major advancement arose from an NCEAS working group organized by Victoria (Sork et al., 1998), which led to the development of novel genetic tools with Peter Smouse, such as TwoGener (Smouse et al., 2001). These tools allowed the estimation of genetic parameters, such as the effective number of pollen donors (a critical metric that reflects the risk of genetic drift in plant populations), and allowed testing how landscape changes, such as habitat loss and fragmentation, would impact contemporary gene flow, thus shaping future patterns of genetic diversity. Tools for testing hypotheses about gene movement were largely lacking up to this point for conservation genetic studies in continuously distributed plant populations and were predominately limited to the difficult to use direct parentage analysis. Continuing her effective collaboration with Smouse and excellent post-docs, Victoria then worked on developing similar approaches to assess the impacts of seed-mediated gene flow (Grivet et al., 2005), directly compare the contributions of pollen and seed mediated gene flow on standing patterns of genetic diversity (Grivet et al., 2009; Robledo-Arnuncio et al., 2012), and translate these metrics into the α and γ diversity statistics familiar to ecologists to build a bridge between ecology and evolutionary biology (Scofield et al. 2012, Sork et al., 2015). These, along with many other studies, provided the insight that local gene flow of pollen and especially seed leads to the development of genetic structure that allows the evolution of local adaptation. Simultaneously, long-distance gene flow, especially by pollen, has the ability to maintain high levels of genetic diversity across large spatial scales. Victoria's work has spanned a broad range of spatial and temporal scales, from tens of meters to thousands of kilometers, and from present-day patterns of gene flow to the long evolutionary history of speciation and hybridization in oaks. Victoria has pioneered the use of genetic tools to understand how very fine-scale patterns of genetic structure (Loiselle et al., 1995; Sork et al., 2015) give insight into the genetic consequences of propagule movement and eventually scale up to affect landscape-level patterns of genetic variation (Sork et al., 1999; Sork & Smouse, 2006). These landscape-level patterns can then be used to identify populations of conservation concern with distinctive genetic composition and evolutionary history (Grivet et al., 2008), improve conservation decision making (Sork et al., 2009), and understand how climate niches of tree populations are likely to shift under different climate change scenarios (Sork et al., 2010). At broader spatial and temporal scales, Victoria and collaborators have conducte d a number of phylogeographic studies on diverse taxa ranging from oaks to lichen-forming fungi (Chen et al., 2016; Grivet et al., 2006; Gugger et al., 2013; Sork, Gugger, et al., 2016; Sork & Werth, 2014). Tree populations are especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change due to their slow generation times, and Victoria has led a number of foundational studies that improved our understanding of patterns of local adaptation to climate in trees. Despite the potential for extensive gene flow that would homogenize populations, her work has shown that tree populations can show distinct genomic signatures of local adaptation to climate (Gugger et al., 2016, 2020; Sork, 2016; Sork, Squire, et al., 2016). Victoria has also shown that epigenetic patterns in DNA cytosine methylation can also reveal patterns of local adaptation to climate in trees (Gugger et al., 2016; Platt et al., 2015), providing an addition tool to inform how plant populations will respond to changing climates (Verhoeven et al., 2016). Victoria's work on landscape genomics and epi-genomics is complemented by experimental studies testing for local adaptation in population-level differences in gene expression to environmental stressors, such as drought (Gugger et al., 2017; Mead et al., 2019). Victoria's strategy of using multiple lenses to view the question of local adaptation to climate in tree populations is a prime example of an approach that will be critical to generate the knowledge needed to conserve and manage tree populations under climate change (Sork, 2016; Sork, Aitken, et al., 2013). Across her many studies, Victoria has maintained a strong focus on oaks as a study system, and in particular, developing valley oak (Quercus lobata) as an emerging model system for tree genomics. The motivation for focusing on oaks is clear: they are key components of many ecosystems around the world. Victoria has fostered genomic research on oaks, and trees in general, by developing resources, such as reference transcriptomes (Cokus et al., 2015) and an annotated reference genome for valley oak (Sork, Fitz-Gibbon, et al., 2016; Sork., in prep), including a high-quality chromosomal level assembly available to the public through the Valley Oak Genome Project (https://valleyoak.ucla.edu/genomic-resources/). The development of genomic resources is complemented by the establishment of large-scale common garden experiments in valley oak with ~7,000 individuals (Delfino Mix et al., 2015), which provide the critical data needed to link genomic variation to phenotypic variation (Browne et al., 2019). Victoria is now focusing on the newly formed California Conservation Genomics Project, where she and her colleagues across the University of California System, state and federal agencies, and conservation organizations, will embark on resequencing 20,000 genomes across 150 species in California. This initiative will provide crucial information on patterns of genomic variation for an unprecedented number of species for policy makers and resource managers in California, which will aid in identifying and managing vulnerable populations. All of the reference genomes generated in this project will be made publicly available, providing yet another invaluable resource to the molecular ecology community at large. In addition to her scientific contributions, Victoria has an equally impressive record of service to her field and of advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice for underrepresented groups in STEM. She served as an associate editor for Molecular Ecology from 2004–2011 and as a Senior editor since 2011. From 2004–2009, Victoria served as chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA, and as Dean of Life Sciences in the College of Letters and Sciences from 2009–2020. During her time as Dean, Victoria successfully developed and advanced a number of initiatives aimed at promoting diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, such as formalizing mentorship programs for new faculty, ensuring equity in pay and advancement for all faculty, increasing equity in hiring, and building more inclusive classrooms by revising curriculum and training faculty (O'Leary et al., 2020). In 2018, she received the UCLA Academic Senate Career Commitment to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) Award. She also played key roles in founding the UCLA La Kretz Center for California Conservation Science and reinvigorating the development of the Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden, where she currently serves as Director. Summarizing the entirety of Victoria's career thus far in a short article is difficult and entire lines of her research, such as the evolutionary ecology of masting (Kelley & Sork 2002) or hybridization and introgression in oaks (Sork, Riordan, et al., 2016; Kim et al., 2018), were not able to be covered here. But what is clear is that Victoria has changed the way we approach landscape genetics and has already left an indelible mark on the field of molecular ecology. Moving forward, Victoria will surely continue to deepen her impact. As anyone who has had the pleasure of knowing her can attest, her pure love of research, her commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, and her endless energy and zest for life is a winning combination we can all aspire towards.