Profile Piece on Matthew Forister

Biology Professor Creates Opportunities with Bugs
Seated at the laboratory counter, Matthew Forister began to transfer testing materials from test tube to test tube.
“Right now I am studying DNA from a butterfly,” Forister said. “This butterfly has an obscene number of subspecies.”
Forister, 34, and a Research Assistant Professor Dept. of Natural Resources & Environmental Science at the University of Nevada, Reno, is conducting ecology research on different plant eating insects. Bugs are the most abundant species on this planet. Learning the complexities of speciation and how organisms adapt to changing environments is done very effectively through analysis of these creatures.
“I believe a biologist by the name of E. O. Wilson said, ‘to a first order of approximation, all animals are beetles,’” Forister said.
Forister has been conducting research on this topic for about a year and has a team of two graduates, Elaine Legras and Cynthia Scholl, and an undergraduate student named Matt Embry. He also has about six more prospective students looking to work in the summer. Students and faculty have been giving positive feedback.
“I think it is a great opportunity,” Ben Weiss, 19, and a biology major at the University of Nevada, Reno, said. “It is a great way to gain experience in the field and a lot of undergraduates would like the chance. Graduates are typically the ones favored for this research.”
Forister has also gotten the opportunity to work with other faculty members throughout his research. When working with new topics of interest it is common for faculty to collaborate. No one knows everything so it makes sense to feed off of one another.
“I’ve never seen these moths before but other faculty members know,” Forister said. “He can do the ecology while I do the genetics.”
Guy Hoelzer, 52, a population genetics professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, said it has been great working with Forister. He is full of new ideas.
“He’s fantasitic to work with,” Hoelzer said. “He struck up a number of collaborations at the beginning and it has been going well.”
Forister’s research is actually open to students of all majors as well. While obtaining his Bachelors degree, he was an English major at the University of San Francisco. It was not until his first encounter with the world of science that he discovered what he really wanted to do.
“I volunteered on a whim with an archeological project,” Forister said. “It was there that I learned science is fun.”
Branden Jung, 18, and an economics major at the University of Nevada, Reno, thinks that providing research opportunities to a wider spectrum of students is an excellent idea.
“Expanding these possibilities will make other disciplines more valid,” Jung said. With the technological emphasis on the sciences, liberal arts, along with other majors, are being left behind. This would help legitimize their academic standing on par with disciplines such as science and engineering.”
Forister also learned that science opens the doors to discovery. When trying to examine different aspects of life on earth, starting at a smaller scale is the best way to see the bigger picture. To explain this fully, Forister compared the life of a butterfly to that of a mountain lion.
“For a butterfly, the plants they eat are their whole world,” Forister said. “They are tied to the life cycle of the plant. It is easy to study them and learn their behavior because of this. A mountain lion, on the other hand, travels across great distances and its behavior can vary with each new terrain.”
It is also essential to consider that the life-span of insects is much shorter than that of other species. Considering evolution occurs through generations, a visual representation would occur considerably faster in bugs.
This was shown through Kettlewell’s famous peppered experiment. In the article Kettlewell's Missing Evidence, A Study in Black and White written by Douglas Kellogg Allchin, this concept was restated.
“The images of the moths against different backgrounds—black against mottled white and mottled white against black (Figure 1)—are themselves a visual argument for natural selection (Tufte 1997, Robins 1992),” Allchin wrote. Any half-witted predatory bird would notice the difference. The lesson for "survival of the fittest" is vividly clear, even without words.”
When considering the particulars of this research, Forister realized it is an interesting line of work. Near the end of his laboratory research, he stood up and walked over to his thermo- cycler for final test.
“It is a little strange,” Forister said. “I kill a butterfly, grind it up, send it to a lab and analyze the genetics. But, as my wife said, at least it is dying for a reason. It is not simply being preyed upon by a bird.”