A grant fit for a 'genius'

PSU professor gets fellowship

Natalya Stanko For the CDT

As a high school student, Beth Shapiro worked as a professional broadcast journalist. As a college freshman, she was a news director for a local radio station and a country music DJ on the weekends.

Getty Images photo/Chris Gardner

Beth Shapiro, an assistant professor at Penn State’s Eberly College of Science, was recently awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, which included a $500,000 grant over the next five years. The fellowship recognizes innovators in all disciplines anonymously nominated by their peers.

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“I don’t know why I did that,” she says now. “I don’t even like country music!”

As an upperclassman she dropped journalism for her second passion: pure science research. And as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University from 1999 to 2002, she headed the wine club and “stumbled into ancient DNA research.”

She’s been studying old bones ever since.

The 33-year-old Shapiro, an assistant professor of biology at Penn State’s Eberly College of Science since 2007, was recently awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.

As a MacArthur Fellow, Shapiro gets $500,000 over five years— no strings attached.

This year’s 24 fellows were nominated anonymously by their peers and chosen for their extraordinary creativity and their potential to do more. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has given the award to recognize innovators in all disciplines, from photojournalism to papermaking, since 1981.

Shapiro grew up in Rome, Ga., where her mother worked as a nurse and her father sold pianos. She attended the University of Georgia on a full-tuition scholarship. After studying at Oxford, she became a junior research fellow there in 2004.

Three years later, she moved to State College because Penn State offered “smart colleagues and opportunities to work on a wide range of topics,” she says.

Shapiro extracts DNA from extinct animals such as mammoths and from threatened species such as bison. She uses the genetic information to explain how evolution works in populations of large animals and how environmental changes — like the Ice Age or the introduction of humans into North America — influence populations.

Looking at how animals have responded in the past to their changing climate can help predict how today’s animals will be affected by climate change, Shapiro says.

She will use her grant money to do some risky experiments, which she defines as “anything where you don’t know the result before you start.”

Traditional funding sources such as the National Science Foundation, which taxpayers finance, hesitate to fund projects that involve bones or species other than those Shapiro has already tested, she notes.

But $500,000 doesn’t go far in molecular biology. Shapiro says she just hopes it covers the cost of gathering preliminary data, which she will begin next year.

Shapiro won’t say what species she will experiment on. “In most cases, we’re still deciding what to do.”

The MacArthur award is often called the “genius grant.”

“Whether it be her humble nature, her will to answer the tough questions, or the enthusiasm that she brings to work and our lab, Beth is truly exceptional,” Justin Sloane said in an e-mail. Sloane is an undergraduate student and researcher at Shapiro’s lab.

But Shapiro doesn’t think she’s a genius. “I’m lucky,” she says.

Tim Reynolds, a sophomore majoring in forestry, is in Shapiro’s 750-student introductory biology class. Reynolds says that Shapiro has a “bright personality.” “She’s great at communicating the basics.”

In part, Shapiro is still a journalist. She likes to give talks about science, especially about cloning. Shapiro says that using old DNA to bring back extinct species is difficult, expensive and still not possible. And pointless, she adds.

Shapiro asks: Why would you bring back one example of something extinct? Where would you put it? Wouldn’t it be lonely? What kind of quality of life would it have? Would it be just for our own amusement? That would be kind of mean, wouldn’t it?

Shapiro won’t be teaching at the university next semester because she is expecting her first baby, a boy, on Dec. 1. “I guess I’ll have to take some time off.”

Motherhood is “very scary,” she says. “But I’m ready to not be pregnant anymore.”

Shapiro has carried out experiments in Russia, Canada and Alaska. Two summers ago, she lived in a tent in Siberia for six weeks on treeless permafrost buzzing with mosquitoes. She researched whatever animal remains she could find within the layers of permafrost.

Shapiro likes working in the field more than in the lab. “Obviously!” she says.

“But you can’t live on field work alone. The field work is the most fun part, but the lab work is the most important part.”

Natalya Stanko is a journalism student at Penn State.