Kristine Callis-Duehl, Ph.D., is the Sally and Derick Driemeyer Executive Director of Education at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center. Kristine brings a unique interdisciplinary approach to her role, blending her background and expertise in medicine, plant science, and education to transform communities and provide cutting-edge science education to students in K-12.
Kristine's work ignites students' innate curiosity and creativity and builds pathways to plant science careers, providing support systems that empower students to thrive. Driven by her vision to transform science education and community resilience, Kristine is shaping the next generation of plant scientists who will tackle some of our most pressing global challenges.
Conviron sat down with Kristine to talk about her role at the Danforth Center and the impact of her work on local and global communities.
Tell us about your background, education, and experience
Growing up in the American education system, I was always good at math and science. I was often told I should become a doctor, so that's what I did.
While working with a newly opened MSF (Doctors without Borders) clinic in Laos, PDR, I learned about the local use of medicinal plants. These skills allowed us to stretch the Western pharmaceutical medicines that were a limited resource
While I was in Laos, the UN passed REDD+ (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), and China signed on to reduce deforestation in its southern provinces. Plantation owners were told they could not expand their rubber plantations, so they moved 15 kilometers south to the valley where I was working in Laos. Farmers were told they had to plant as many hectares of rubber as there were hectares of rice, or their families would be put in jail. Some who voiced concern and resisted disappeared. This had a big impact on me.
Prior to this, despite average income being quite low (about $50 per family per year), no one in the communities where I worked was homeless or hungry or unclothed. Their needs were met through the plants they grew and harvested in the valley. However, as deforestation and rubber plantations spread to the area - everything changed. During monsoon season, the valley filled up like a bowl, and for the first time, its people were starving.
What I learned from this experience is the deep connection between medicine and conservation. Plants are essential to life on earth. I decided then that if I was going to make a global impact, it would be through plant science.
I earned my master's degree in ethnobotany when I came back from Laos and after that completed my PhD in plant science at the University of Florida. There, I combined plant science with my work in medicine, studying secondary plant metabolites as plant defenses as well as physical plant defenses. My research explored the trade-offs between physical and chemical plant defenses to see how we can induce plants to produce the chemistry that we use as humans.
While I was in my PhD program, I was also part of a National Science Foundation program called GK-12, which provided funding for graduate students in STEM disciplines. My fellowship was to be a science instructor in a middle school classroom for two years.
Through that work, I started to understand what I had failed to see in Laos—that it was a lack of education that led to a lot of poor decision-making that was happening. I decided that I wanted to focus my career on combining education and science and using that for community transformation.
If I can change the way we educate people, so it is based on innate scientific curiosity, then I move the needle tremendously not just for science now, but for science forever.
Source: Conviron
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