Dr. Morgan Furze, assistant professor of botany and plant pathology and forestry and natural resources, considers herself an eco-physiologist. Her work considers how plants function in response to their environment.
Although Morgan’s favorite activity as a child was being in the garden club in elementary school, learning about and working with plants, her path to her current position was anything but linear. But, in the end, she returned to her roots to find a promising research and teaching career.
As an undergraduate student in biology at Bucknell University, Furze did undergraduate research in a bat lab, studying white nose syndrome, a fungal pathogen, while earning a bachelor’s degree in biology (2012).
“I didn’t take any plant science courses at all, which I think is kind of interesting,” Furze shared. “I like to tell students that so that they are inspired to change their path as many times as they need to find the right one.”
Not only did Furze not study plants, the closest she got to them during that time was a Chinese brush painting class that took place in a greenhouse. “I was observing plants, but I didn’t know how they worked at all,” she noted.
With many of the people around her moving on to graduate school, Morgan decided to combine her interests as a yoga instructor and in health to work towards a PhD in nutrition. After one semester, she pivoted and took a job working for the National Audubon Society in New York City. There she was part of a community conservation and education team and helped with the production of children’s science magazines and scholarships for community conservation programs. She still wasn’t thinking about plants, mostly birds. But, as she spent time hiking in nature, she began to be curious about how organisms responded to their varying environments, revisiting lessons from her youth.
“I remember in fourth grade, I first heard the words global warming and teachers were telling me about sea level rise and that it was going to be a threat in the future,” Furze recalled. “Early on in my education it was instilled in me that this was something that I should care about. I think that drove me to be more conscious about how I interacted in the environment, like always riding my bike, etc. It always seemed like a pressing issue and as a child I was confused as to why no one was doing anything about it.”
When she looked at continuing her graduate studies after leaving the nutrition path, she recalled her early passion for plants and the garden club and thought maybe something related to that could hold her interest.
The program she joined at Harvard University focused on organismic and evolutionary biology. Furze finished her PhD in 2019 with a dissertation on “Understanding whole-plant non-structural carbohydrate storage in a changing world.”
“Everyone was doing something ecology or evolution related, but on a specific organism,” Furze explained. “I was in a tree lab and I have stuck with it ever since. I did a postdoc where I worked in agro-ecosystems, specifically on almond trees in California, and now I’m still in the tree lab. In my lab, we study trees in all different environments. I am always jumping around doing different things, working in a new system or asking a new question, which is why this is a pretty good job for me.
“I was always interested in the environment and preserving our environment and one way I could think to do that was to study how forests responded to global change. What we do in my lab tends to be very basic or fundamental research where we are looking at the mechanisms that underlie why a tree responds the way it does or how it physiologically works. But, as I have gotten further and further along, I have recognized that doing research that is also applied is really rewarding because you can have tangible impacts and can try to solve a little piece of the puzzle.”