ASPB members share a common goal of promoting the growth, development, and outreach of plant biology as a pure and applied science. This column features some of the dedicated and innovative members of ASPB who believe that membership in our Society is crucial to the future of plant biology.

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Membership Corner

Name: David E. Salt
Title: Associate Professor
Place of work or school: Purdue University
Research area: Molecular Physiology of Metal Hyperaccumulation and Tolerance
Member since: 1991

1. Has being a member of ASPB helped you in your career? If so, how?
Yes, by giving me the chance to meet and collaborate with other plant biologists

2. Why has being a member of ASPB been important?
Since I came to the United States in 1990, after my graduate education had finished, it was very important for me to meet the plant biology community in the USA. Being a member of ASPB and attending the annual meetings helped me achieve this.

3. Was someone instrumental in getting you to join ASPB?
I first joined ASPB when I was a postdoc in George Wagner’s laboratory at the University of Kentucky. George motivated me to join so that I could attend the annual meeting in Albuquerque.

4. What would you tell nonmembers to encourage them to join?
Attending the annual meeting is a great way to find like-minded drinking buddies who also happen to be plant biologists!

5. Have you found a job using ASPB job postings or through networking at the annual meeting?
No, not directly, but contacts in the plant biology community have certainly helped.

6. Have you hired anyone as a result of a job posting at the meeting or on our online Job Bank?
Yes, several postdocs.

7. Do you still read print journals? If so, where do you usually read them?
Almost all the articles I now read are printed from online pdf files that I read in my office.

8. What do you think is the next “big thing” in plant biology?
Two areas that I am excited by are what I call “post Arabidopsis genomics” and “in silico biology.” The first is the use of Arabidopsis tools to study interesting biology in close relatives of Arabidopsis thaliana. There are many species out there with similar genomes to Arabidopsis that do really interesting things like tolerate high salt, drought, cold, heavy metals, and low nutrient levels; produce floral scent; and the like. I think we can leverage the tools and information we have on Arabidopsis to learn more about these processes. The second area, “in silico biology,” will require the development and use of integrated data-mining tools to perform experiments in a synthetic environment on the computer. Such experiments would lead to sophisticated predictions that could then be tested with “wet experiments.” I think such an approach should help us leap-frog over a lot of the preliminary range-finding experiments that we have to now do before we hit on the really insightful experiments.

9. What person, living or dead, do you most admire?
I would say that it has to be Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill, both amazing leaders who were able to mobilize people to achieve extraordinary goals.

10. What are you reading these days?
The last four books I read were Elvis, Jesus, & Coca-Cola, by Kinky Friedman; The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World, by Michael Pollan; White Mughals, Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India, by William Dalrymple; and The Piano Tuner, by Daniel Mason. I am not sure what the connections are, but they were all great fun to read.

11. What are your hobbies?
I will interpret this as what do I do when I am not at the university. The answer would be spend as much time outside on my five-acre mini-farm as possible. This would involve anything from having fires in my woods, tending the vegetable garden, looking after the sheep, making repairs on the barn and farmhouse, and all sorts of other “physical, getting dirty” type of stuff. I find this is a good counterpoint to all the “mind work” that I do at the university.

12. What is your most treasured possession?
The ability to not treasure possessions.

13. What do you still have left to learn?
How to see the wood for the trees.