By: Mukta Pillai | Science Editor
On Tuesday, Feb. 11, I sat down with Rick Lehtinen, professor of biology at The College of Wooster. Lehtinen discussed his time at Wooster and his professional journey.
MP: First off, do you mind introducing yourself to students and readers?
RL: I’m Rick Lehtinen and I’m a biology professor here at The College of Wooster. I’ve been here [23 years], so I’ve been teaching students at Wooster longer than most of our current students have been alive. I focus on ecology, evolution and conservation. What some people call macro-level biology, I teach those sorts of classes and advise I.S. projects in those areas.
MP: What drew you or brought you to Wooster?
RL: Particularly the I.S. program, one-on-one interaction, every week for a year and a half. I mean, it’s just a really intense and close interaction … Those have been some of the most amazing experiences and at least from a mentoring standpoint, are some of the experiences that you feel like you’ve done the most good. Sometimes at the end of the semester, you walk out of the classroom and wonder if anybody learned anything in your class, but it’s usually very obvious the kinds of things that people get out of I.S. … It’s just really rewarding to be a part of that and feeling like I really made a difference in this student’s life, not only personally, but professionally, and just helping them grow.
MP: The I.S. research is also why I came to Wooster, so it’s nice to see that others feel the same as well. I know a lot of my peers feel a similar pressure with finding careers and just seeing where they will end up in, let’s say five or ten years. So, I wanted to ask you, how did you find your path as an academic and also a biologist?
RL: I was always the kind of kid who was fascinated by nature. I always spent a ton of time outside. I’d come home with frogs in my pockets and stuff, and that was always just a big draw for me … It wasn’t until I was maybe in my second or third semester in college that I sort of put things together, that maybe I can actually take my love of nature and make that into a career. I didn’t even declare until the last minute where they forced you to … [Then] I took an entomology course in my sophomore year, which is a course on insects. You know, you sit in the classroom, you watch presentations, you memorize definitions, you kind of do the normal classroom thing, which, from time to time was mildly interesting. But then, in the lab of this class, we went on field trips, and went outside. We asked questions and then went to nature to find the answer to the question. Once I realized that there was such a thing as field biology — actually going into nature to answer questions about how the world is put together and how it all functions — that [was] like, okay, I have found my niche. This is what I want to do. Now, after I got my undergrad, I did a master’s in graduate school. During the process of getting my master’s degree, which took about two years, it was during that time that I kind of decided that I did want to go on and get a PhD. Partly because I liked the kind of academic environment. There’s a lot of great people that you run into and get to interact with — students, friends, colleagues. That’s very different from most other work environments, where, I don’t know, you’re working to get a paycheck, rather than [where] the primary kind of drive is sort of trying to understand the world.
MP: I think a lot of students can really relate to that. I was going through your website before this interview, and I saw the Salamander Squad. How did you begin that project and form it?
RL: About 10 or 12 years ago, I started a salamander project at Wooster Memorial Park with the desire to, among other things, start a long-term monitoring project. For those of us who study ecology and conservation biology, one of the things that’s in front of our face all the time is that a lot of the wonderful biodiversity that’s part of our world is very much under threat from a number of different causes. Chief among them are climate change and invasive species [and] especially habitat loss and habitat destruction. I wanted to get this long-term data so that we could monitor our local populations of salamanders and detect declines before they got too serious, if they were occurring at all. So back in 2014, we started this project where there were a bunch of different areas at Wooster Memorial Park that we went back to at the same time every year and searched for salamanders using the same methods. [Then] we would have [a] measurement of how many salamanders of each of the different species that are out there occurred every season and every year to, again, accumulate this information, to provide a baseline to compare future populations to.
MP: When you first started, who was a part of this project?
RL: Initially, it was just me … [Then] I asked some of my students in one of my classes if they would be interested in coming out to help sample salamanders and get the data. It was mostly students, but then we started expanding it to just the general Wooster community. Not just The College of Wooster community, but you know, we have retirees, people from churches, little kids and just random people who are interested in salamanders. We kind of put the word out like, “hey, we’re the salamander squad. If you’re interested in salamanders and want to come out and help us find them, maybe hold one in your hands, take some pictures, and just enjoy these little critters, come on out.” We’ve had hundreds of people come out over the years and have that experience. I’m sure some didn’t enjoy it, but I think most people probably did. People won’t protect what we don’t love, and you can’t love what you don’t know. So that was some of the driving force to get this information, but then in the process of getting the information, trying to widen the circle of care and then get people out into nature so that they’ll care about nature.
MP: You also mentioned that one of your interests is ecology, and seeing that you’ve been at Wooster for 23 years, I wanted to ask you, how have you observed changes in Wooster’s environment and overall campus here?
RL: Honestly, I think there’s actually more things that have stayed the same than have changed. I mean, Wooster students then were great, curious, outgoing, bright, hard-working kids, and they still are. I loved interacting with them then, and I still do. Some of our buildings are new … [Williams] was only built in 2018.
When I first came to Wooster, one of the dominant trees in the forest that we do have and even right here on campus was the white ash. Ashes and a whole bunch of species of ashes were a dominant forest tree throughout much of North America. An insect called the emerald ash borer was accidentally introduced to Michigan from somewhere in Asia. This is a parasite of ash trees. This tree and several species that used to be an important part of our forests in this region are now completely gone. They’re all dead. There are two trees I think left on campus. One is actually just right up here outside of Severance. And there’s another one at the corner of Kauke, the west corner of Kauke near Galpin.
MP: Is there any advice that you would like to give to nervous students who are now entering this sphere?
RL: [I think it] would be a very difficult time to be a young person who want[s] to study climate change [right now] because your major funding sources have gone out the window for the next four years — at least to the extent that they can legally do that, they’re undoubtedly going to do it. But there’s all things that are within our power in our own lives here in Wooster, here on The College of Wooster campus, that can make a positive difference regardless of what’s going on in the White House. So, you know, it’s a long race, right? And long races are won by just putting one foot in front of the other and continuing. It might seem like slow progress, it might even seem like no progress sometimes, but if we keep stepping in the right direction, one day we’re going to see that we’re close to the finish line. But, we’ve already made a ton of progress on that. I mean, just think of all the lights on around the world, all the lights on just in this country. A very substantial proportion of the energy that’s keeping the lights on around the world is already renewable energy. I think there’s hope. Not only can we all do more than we think we can sometimes, but the other thing to keep in mind politically is, you know, less than two years from now are the next set of elections.
MP: Thank you so much. Are there any last words that you’d like to share before that includes?
RL: Go Woo!
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
