Blog

A profile of Marissa Baskett: Capitalizing on Serendipity

“There’s another life a month from now.”

By Sonora Slater

Opening the door to Marissa Baskett’s office, I was met immediately with a ball of white fur (a small dog) jumping out at me, eager to escape the confines of Wickson 2112. The slightly ajar door revealed a bicycle helmet on her desk, thriving plants on her windowsill and photos of the ocean, a sea turtle, the sky plastered across her metal file cabinet. She emerged a second later, hurriedly attaching a leash to the dog’s collar and standing up to push her hair behind earrings that looked patterned to reference the fibonacci sequence.

It was almost too obvious that she works as a conservation ecologist — if someone were tasked with creating a movie set for a sustainability-driven professor, she could be their resident expert. Yet, for Baskett, now a professor and the department chair of the environmental science and policy department at UC Davis, it wasn’t always clear that this was where she belonged.

Leading us outside to find a sunny place to sit while we talked, Baskett explained that going into her freshman year at Stanford University, she knew two things: she liked math, and she liked biology. But as she put it, when you’re a kid, “you’ve only seen so many careers in your life.” She wasn’t sure how exactly her interests fit together into a major or a job; it wasn’t until she explored undergraduate research that a path started to crystallize.

“[Stanford] had this physical book where professors listed information about what undergrads in their lab might do,” Baskett said. “I found this page that had one sentence: If you like math, and you like biology, come talk to me. Perfect. That’s all I need to know. Talking to you, Mark.”

Mark Feldman, a professor in the biology department at Stanford, became her mentor for that first foray into the research world, and she went on to do an undergraduate honors thesis and, eventually, complete her Master’s degree, PhD and postdoc. Even her very first research position was paid, a fact that has made her passionate about making financially feasible opportunities like this more common for students at public universities like UC Davis.

“Doing an honors thesis is what opens doors; it makes it possible to have a successful application to a PhD program,” Baskett said. “And everything flows from there.”

She said that having experienced the funding at Stanford that makes it possible for nearly every undergraduate interested in independent research to do so, she is now deeply invested in working toward that sort of accessibility coming to public universities as well.

Baskett went to graduate school at Princeton University with the goal of doing math applied to ecology in some capacity, hoping to have the opportunity to work on a project related to conservation. Luckily, marine reserves were then emerging as a new tool in sustainable fishery management, and she was able to join a working group on the topic.

“I was just kind of at the right place at the right time,” Baskett said. “And really, there’s a lot of capitalizing on serendipity in life. […] But also, you have to pay attention to know that it is the right place at the right time, and put in the effort. Yeah, a lot of it is luck, but it’s also you jumping on that luck, and then putting in the effort when those lucky moments happen.”

The same combination of “luck” and hard work was what eventually brought her to UC Davis. After she earned her PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology from Princeton University , and was considering her next step, she said that she felt like “everything was on the table” — working at an R1 university doing both research and teaching, working in a liberal arts university more focused on teaching, or working at a government agency for the sole purpose of research.

“I was planning to apply to all of it,” Baskett said. “And then this job came along early, and I got really lucky. It was the dream of that balance, where you get the research [and] you get the teaching. […] Teaching was always an inherent part of this experience, and I prioritized a position like this because it did have that.”
This quarter, Baskett is focused on teaching two classes: an undergraduate course about how populations change over time, and a graduate class about reviewing primary literature to determine where a research field is going next.

“My undergraduate class is population ecology, […] but it’s also a methods class about how we use mathematical models to think through different possibilities of population dynamics,” Baskett said. “It’s a lot of fun to teach, because it’s really one of the first times students see how all the math they learned and were required to take is actually useful. Using math as a way of thinking clearly — it’s a different mentality. And even if you’re not going to be a modeler, the way it forces you to be rigorously logical is still a life lesson.”

This mentality is very in line with Baskett’s own research today as a conservation ecologist who “uses mathematical models as a sandbox to play with how we might think about different management approaches.” However, she noted that throughout her time at UC Davis, she’s come to realize how important getting non-ecologist perspectives can be in making those models more accurate.

“The amazing part of being embedded in a department like this that’s multidisciplinary, with economists, with political scientists, with ecologists all sitting together and talking to each other, is that it expands how you think about these things,” Baskett said. “Before here, I was always in an ecology and evolution group. And here I am, having hallway conversations with people from social science.”

She gave the example of her current work on kelp restoration — the multidisciplinary team she’s so entrenched in has helped her think about how to approach restoration with people in mind as well as the ecosystem.

“With this particular project, the kelp decline was driven in part by […] a marine heatwave,” Baskett said. “And we know more marine heat waves are coming with climate change. So how do we think about future climate change and the uncertainties associated with that? How might people be able to be more nimble in response to future extreme events?”

According to Baskett, this is exactly the question that more and more graduate students are coming into their studies asking, with a “hunger to do applied work” that directly informs management decision making. She described it as an “urgency,” a word often used in the conversation surrounding climate change, but also one that can cause anxiety or hopelessness.

Baskett does believe that there’s an immediacy to environmental science, and a reason to prioritize “user-driven science that starts with the needs and the questions that are around those needs.” But in a way, she sees this global focus on ecology as an opportunity.

“There are never-ending questions to answer, and never-ending roles to play, and a never-ending demand for this work,” Baskett said. “The despair doesn’t help anybody.”

At the end of our interview, I told her that while I’m happy with my major in managerial economics with an environmental economics emphasis, I think in another life I might have done environmental science.

“Well,” she said, “There’s another life a month from now.”

As I left the interview, I walked past the sheep on the lawn, and the overhanging trees, and I pushed my hair behind earrings shaped like silverware — leaving with a little more hope for the murky path ahead, and maybe just a little more respect for people who love math.

Sustainable Oceans Symposium highlights ideas to “make the sustainable attainable”

The one-day conference featured graduate students and others throughout California presenting research related to nearshore environments, species interaction, fish and more

“Maybe there’s a way our curiosity can be not just in the natural systems, but also in the systems overlaying them.”

By Sonora Slater

Sun was shining through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the UC Davis International Center multipurpose room on May 31, greeting attendees of the 2023 Sustainable Oceans Research Symposium as they filed into the open room holding paper, pen and reusable water bottles. 

The conference went from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., provided breakfast and lunch to attendees and offered both in-person and Zoom attendance options. It was split into four sections: species interactions, socio-ecological approaches & ecosystem services, fish and nearshore environments. According to the introductory speech by Priya Shukla, a PhD candidate at UC Davis, the purpose of the conference was to highlight research that is seeking to “make the sustainable attainable.”

“[Ocean systems] are part of something much bigger, and they involve people, and they involve policy and management,” Shukla said. “So when we think about that, maybe there’s a way our curiosity can be not just in the natural systems, but also in the systems overlaying them.”

Christopher Janousek, an assistant professor from Oregon State University, kicked off Session 2 with a presentation about carbon sequestration along the Pacific coast.

Carbon sequestration is an ecosystem service of emerging importance, according to Janousek. Many ecosystems provide natural “services” that improve life for humans — for example, tree roots hold soil in place to prevent erosion or landslides, bees pollinate flowers, vultures and fungi help scavenge and decompose waste, and so on. Soil offers an ecosystem service by trapping carbon, keeping it from rising into the atmosphere and contributing to global warming. 

As climate change becomes a major topic of discussion for scientists, policymakers and environmentalists, understanding more about what types of environments are better at this process may become a very important question, according to Janousek.

For this study, he said that they compiled data from more than 1000 soil samples across tide flats, marshes, mangroves and tidal swamps, gathering a lot of information about outside factors that could affect the level of sequestration and covering a broad range of areas with different rain levels, temperatures, tides and species compositions. 

In the end, they had two main takeaways: first, that tidal swamps and tidal flats may be under recognized carbon sequestration ecosystems. Second, that there is potential for restored wetlands to increase carbon sequestration, but more data is needed. 

“This is probably just a drop in the bucket of what there is to learn.”

“This is probably just a drop in the bucket of what there is to learn,” Janousek said. He believes that, moving forward, this research could help researchers, managers and policymakers. 

Chris Heggerud, a post-doc student at UC Davis who noted that his favorite marine animal is a leopard seal, went next, presenting a model of the dynamics of phytoplankton. 

Phytoplankton “blooms,” or rapid increases in the population, can produce toxins, as well as reducing water clarity. They’re often caused by run-off from urban industrial sources of agricultural run-off or fertilizers. But more broadly, their population dynamics, according to Heggerud, can be modeled by four main population dynamics: biotic interactions like competition or grazing, environmental factors like climate or lake conditions, socio-economic considerations like human impact and resource dynamics like nutrient availability. 

Looking specifically at the socio-economic considerations, Heggerud also incorporated the human decision to either “cooperate” to reduce the algae population by decreasing agricultural run-off and/or urban development, or “defect” and keep doing what they’re doing, as well as assigning an associated cost to each one. Heggerud said that theoretically, this model could be used to encourage favorable outcomes, or to avoid unfavorable ones. 

Mei Blundell, a PhD candidate in population biology at UC Davis who especially appreciates dumbo octopuses, closed out the session. Her presentation, titled, “Tea with the Man in the Trailer out Front,” went in a slightly different direction; rather than discussing specific research, she shared reflections on her summer internship at Fort Bragg, where she developed second grade curriculum about kelp and basic coding. 

Blundell highlighted stories about her interactions with a man who lived in a trailer nearby where she lived and would occasionally invite her over for tea and scones, and to share his thoughts about research ethics.

According to Blundell, this man expressed anger that researchers were conducting an experiment in the Jackson Demonstration State Forest to see the effect of logging on sediment build-up in Casper Creek. He felt that they weren’t aware of or weren’t taking into account the impact of the study on local residents’ lives.

“‘It’s science’s obsession with numbers,’” she said, paraphrasing his words. “They need to demonstrate how much sediment builds up when you clear cut around a river. But what’s the point? Everyone knows that clear-cutting is bad. Those are our relatives, our family, our clear water, and they cut them down. Is it worth cutting them down?” 

This perspective, Blundell went on to say, is one that she plans to take with her throughout the rest of her career as a researcher. 

“What would it look like for my research to be a community service?” Blundell said. “And are my questions worth the answers?”

Can artificial intelligence be conscious?
Here’s what cognitive science has to say about it

By Sonora Slater

“As long as we lean into one of our most human traits — our ability to learn and adapt — […] we’ll be just fine.”

Humans naturally want to assume that we are simply better or different somehow than artificial intelligence. But when ChatGPT can pass law exams, provide advice, brainstorm creative ideas at top speed and avoid typical human issues like, say, writer’s block, it begs the question, at what point of technological improvement will the gap between the human mind and the machine become indistinguishable? 

Well, it turns out this isn’t a new question — cognitive scientists have been asking it, and similar ones about the nature of the mind, for decades. 

Cognitive science is the science of the mind, exploring how those with minds take in information, how they use that information to make decisions and what it is like to experience the positive or negative consequences of these decisions. It sprung out of a desire to make a science out of philosophy in a way that is observable and measurable; but it’s a relatively new field, and the best way to do this is still a topic of debate. 

Previously, there were two main popular theories. The first is behaviorism, which suggests that the mind could be understood simply by observing behavioral responses to various situations. But these have shortcomings.

For one thing, people act in different ways in the same situations. You might be terrified to find yourself onstage to give a speech, while your friend would be excited to bask in the spotlight. Also, behavior is often influenced by what is going to happen in the future, not only by what is currently happening. You might currently want to hang out with your friends instead of working on your homework, but you sit down to finish your physics problem set anyway because you know that if you don’t, you’ll receive a bad grade. 

The other popular theory is identity theory, which suggests that the mind is the brain. But when it comes to artificial intelligence, which doesn’t have a brain, as we currently define it, are these systems automatically incapable of having minds?

These theories have slowly been displaced in favor of the theory of functionalism, although the “correct” conceptual framework is still highly debated. Functionalism suggests that “stimuli” in situations or in our environment affect our internal mental states, which then result in a behavioral response. Because this theory doesn’t rely on the existence of a brain, it opens the door for things without brains — including technology such as AI — to be defined as having a mind. 

If this is true, then how do the recent advances in AI, especially via ChatGPT, fit into the cognitive science perception of what a mind is? If these systems can fit into the functionalist view of a mind, is there anything that differentiates us from them?

Jonathan Dorsey, a philosopher and lecturer at UC Davis, argued that our questions surrounding the mind of artificial systems, and their similarity to our own, have a lot to do with the concept of consciousness.

“Whether you think the mind is the brain, or you think the mind is behavior, or even if you try to characterize the brain functionally, consciousness is going to be something that’s very difficult to account for,” Dorsey said. “When you get into these topics of artificial intelligence, you find that you run up against a lot of the same questions. What is a mind? Is consciousness a necessary condition for having a mind? If it is, can you have an artificial consciousness?” 

Consciousness is the idea that we have conscious experience and we are aware of our thoughts. It is an awareness of internal and external existence. But it is not unique to humans — your pet dog, cat or fish, or the squirrel that stalks you on the bike path is also conscious of their (often questionable) decisions. 

Dorsey referenced a philosophical paper titled, “What is it Like to Be a Bat?,” which explored the idea that no matter how much we learn about bats and their brains, we still won’t know what it’s like to have their conscious experience. We won’t truly know what it is like to be a bat — just as they won’t know what it is like to be human.

“You can study their physiology, but you’re still not going to know what it’s like to be them,” Dorsey said.

This might become the case for artificial systems as well. As it stands, we don’t really understand what it is about our brains that gives us consciousness (“That’s kind of job security for me,” Dorsey said with a laugh); but even if we determine that, and manage to recreate it in an artificial system, there will be something it is like to be an AI system that is different than what it is like to be human. And that difference is probably something we will never fully understand. 

The instinct to hold on to some concrete thing that makes humans intrinsically different, and necessary to our world, has roots in economic job security concerns, psychology and even religion. But at the end of the day, people just seem to be worried that they will somehow become unnecessary to our world.

“People worried about ATMs when they first came out, because they worried they would replace teller jobs,” Dorsey said. “But it turns out it just changed the nature of the work. As long as we lean into one of our most human traits — our ability to learn and adapt — the introduction of AI is something we can adjust to, and we’ll be just fine.”