Eleven years after she was named one of “America’s Hot Young Scientists” by Forbes magazine, plant biologist Sharon Long has become the first woman to head the School of Humanities and Sciences. She took over the deanship in September, succeeding applied physicist Malcolm Beasley.
Long, 50, will lead the effort to raise matching gifts for the $300 million in endowment funds donated to H&S by the Hewlett Foundation. “It’s important to do right by this extraordinary event,” she says.
As she takes the helm of the school that is responsible for 80 percent of undergraduate teaching, Long will draw on her experience as the instructor for a freshman seminar on experiments in microbiology. “Often when students come to university, they have the idea that the best experiments are the ones that use the most advanced technology,” she says. “But what makes a great experiment is the greatness of thought behind it, and the goal of the freshman seminar is to understand logic, not technology. I have students read great experimental papers done with simple technology—simple because it was done 100 years ago.”
Long plans to continue some of her own experiments during her term as dean. A specialist in microbe-plant interaction, she was a lead co-author of a study published in the July 27 issue of the journal Science that decoded the genome map of the bacterium Sinorhizobium meliloti, which could lead to improved crop yields while reducing farmers’ use of weed killers and nitrogen-based fertilizers.
Although her lab team didn’t start out to be a genome group, Long says they realized they had to understand the S. meliloti genome in order to “move the questions we were asking to a higher level of precision.” Working through a problem logically and pushing new frontiers—just what Long wishes for students in her school.
