Svata Louda, PhD, spent 11 consecutive summers at RMBL, 1979 through 1989, arriving each May as the snow melted and staying until mid-September. She went on to become the first woman named George Holmes University Chair of Biological Sciences at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s School of Biological Sciences and, in 1982, only the second woman to win the Ecological Society of America’s Mercer Award for outstanding research — and the first to win it on her own. Today, retired and living in Salida, Colorado, she runs a citizen science project on alpine thistle-insect interactions, continuing the kind of field research that first brought her to RMBL

Louda found her way to RMBL through a chain of scientific connections. As a postdoctoral fellow at Yale in the late 1970s, she worked with a faculty member studying mustard oils, Jim Rodman, who was collaborating with a Francie Chew, a Harvard butterfly researcher working at RMBL. “I applied to look at the role of plant chemistry in insect herbivory and its impact on plant population dynamics, which was relatively unexplored at the time,” she says. When it came time to choose a field site for her postdoctoral research, the decision was easy. “Why not RMBL?”

At RMBL in the late 1970s and 1980s, research and teaching weren’t separate tracks. Faculty taught the field station’s courses themselves, on a volunteer basis, alongside their own research. “I remember teaching two weeks in the 8-week ecology course,” Louda recalls. “It was kind of a community effort to both educate and discover.”

That blend of research and education shaped how she thinks about training scientists to this day. She believes RMBL’s alumni network is an underused resource for the students, postdocs, and young faculty now, not for teaching them the science itself, but for the parts of career development nobody teaches in a classroom. “The young folks know what they’re doing,” she says. “They don’t need input from me on how to do science, or what the questions are. They know that; they’re good at it. But they don’t have the experience that helps make the most of it.” Things like protecting your own time and learning to say no, she adds, were skills she wishes someone had pointed out to her earlier in her career. Her idea is something informal: “Coffees. Go out to dinner with a group of younger researchers, just socially become a resource.” 

That sense of belonging extended to how she was treated as a young woman scientist, in a field that at the time offered few models for one. Ward Watt, Carol Boggs, and David Inouye, all RMBL researchers at the time, “rolled out the carpet and treated me like a colleague immediately,” she recalls. For a young woman scientist in the late 1970s, that experience was unusual and very special. “That was one of the beauties of RMBL. You were treated as an equal. It was more egalitarian than most home universities.”

Word of her 1982 Mercer Award, still one of ecology’s most prestigious early-career honors, reached her the old-fashioned way. She was walking down the road at RMBL when Paul Ehrlich pulled up in a Jeep. “Congratulations!” he said. “For what?” she asked. She hadn’t received the letter yet. Ehrlich had been notified, using one of the era’s analog phones, that Svata had just won the Mercer Award. “It was fun,” she says simply.

She’s kept doing research and teaching in her own way since retiring. Louda’s most recent project is a citizen science initiative. She recruited volunteers to hike to collect insect and plant samples from an alpine thistle found only above treeline, a system where ecological theory predicts relatively little insect activity because of the cold temperatures and short growing season. Instead, she found that the plants are riddled by tephritid fly feeding damage. Her team has since dissected some 1,800 flower heads. The insect collections are now archived at the University of Colorado Natural History Museum’s Entomology Division, a baseline record of species diversity that Louda expects researchers could consult 50 years from now in the context of climate change research.

She sums up what 11 summers at 9,500 feet left her with in a single sentence: “RMBL lives with you, no matter where you are.” It helps develop a way of looking at the world, she explains — an attentiveness to place — that she carried with her long after she left the mountains for the prairies of Nebraska. “I carried that headset to the prairie and prospered. A lot of people kind of put the prairie down, and yet it’s a beautiful ecosystem in its own way. I think I got that feeling from having spent a decade at RMBL.” 

 — Suzanne Ennis
Communications Manager
Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory

Top: Svata Louda and her rescued terrier, Jack.