Biology professor receives NSF grant
for groundbreaking ecology study

Richard Niesenbaum, Ph.D., associate professor of biology, has received an $81,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Division of Environmental Biology. The research award will support his study of how experimenter visitation and measurement affect plant growth and the ecology of plant-insect
interactions.

Niesenbaum and his colleagues term this experimenter effect the “ecological uncertainty principle” based on Werner Heisenberg’s 1927 proposition that there are fundamental limitations to the study of subatomic particles, as the act of measuring them can affect their behavior.

Niesenbaum’s work is confirming that such uncertainty also occurs in ecological studies, where visiting plants to measure rates of herbivory actually changes those rates and significantly impacts the plant-insect interactions being studied. The implications of such “visitation effects” are enormous, and the proposed work will challenge the long-standing assumption that field researchers are “benign observers.”

This interdisciplinary research is being done in collaboration with Christine Ingersoll, assistant professor of chemistry, and J.C. Cahill at the University of Alberta. Sumana Rao, a visiting scientist in Niesenbaum’s lab, will also be involved in the project.

In addition, much of the funding will go to support undergraduate involvement in the research. To date, the work has involved Jeffrey Dipple ’03, Lauren Mastro ’03, Richard Kipp ’04, Emily Kluger ’04 and Steph Zettel ’05, who have developed independent research projects that relate to the overall mission of this work.

With additional funding from the National Science Foundation, there may also be an opportunity for an Allentown School District teacher to be involved in the project this summer.