Harrah Friedlander
CBCS PhD Candidate
If you had asked my high school self what her greatest dream was, it would have been to be a Broadway star performing nightly before massive crowds, living in a small but gorgeously decorated studio apartment in a crowded building in the centre of the Big Apple, the city that never sleeps, New York City.
This aspiration took me to Northwestern University, pursuing a theatre major, which eventually morphed into the new dream of becoming an operatic diva, singing on a new stage on a new continent every week, and I completed my Bachelor’s with a degree in voice and opera performance. A Master’s degree in voice and opera followed, during which I also dipped my toe into directing and developing productions. This culminated in a graduate recital that ended with me covered in paint and singing while other performers recited poetry and philosophy.
Volunteering leads to realisation
You may be double-checking at this point to see why this profile is in the CBCS newsletter. High school me would be just as shocked. Shocked that the idea of living smack-dab in the middle of a huge city would become anathema to me. Shocked that the only times I get on a stage, I am talking and not belting my heart out. Shocked that my new definition of a successful “performance” is getting a lab experiment to work or a field campaign resulting in usable data.
However, the signs were always there. When I was a student and performer at classical music festivals, I would spend the week of classes and rehearsals counting down to when I could get outside and explore the local national parks and hikes. This carried into my professional life as a performer, director and music teacher, where each week became a series of boxes to tick until the next time I could drive out to the local prairies or forest preserves. I began to volunteer with local conservation organisations and the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, Illinois. Finally, I had the realisation that I could do this kind of work full time, and immediately began to apply for conservation biology programs around the United States.
Credit: NON:Op Open Opera Works
Infinite pieces, interlocking balance
At the University of Idaho, where I received my Bachelor’s degree in conservation biology, I tried to absorb as many experiences and perspectives as I could. I felt like I was both making up for lost time and was eager to learn as much as possible about this world I had not even realised existed until long after my first undergraduate degree, during which I only needed to complete one science course and chose astronomy. I gained experience working with graduate students on rough-legged hawk and African ungulate research, interned with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife assisting with their pygmy rabbit conservation project, and filled my free time with exploring the unique Palouse landscape around Moscow, Idaho. One of the most integral experiences of my undergraduate conservation degree was collaborating with and learning from then PhD student (now Dr!) Molly Garrett and her advisor and my undergraduate thesis advisor Dr Lisette Waits.
I assisted with Molly’s research on landscape community genomics in the sagebrush steppe ecosystem, in which, in brief, Molly was looking at how the genetics of a foundational plant species impacted higher levels of biological organisation. Within this larger project, I focused on the arthropod communities on big sagebrush shrubs, assessing whether sagebrush subspecies impacted the larger arthropod community and how this was mediated by other variables like latitude or elevation. Through this work, I began to see conservation not just as the preservation of a single entity but as the protection of an infinite web of interlocking pieces, the loss of any one of which upsets the balance of the system. Like a piece of music, in which each instrument and voice contributes its own unique timbre and resonance, each element of the sagebrush steppe from the unassuming titular shrub to the majestic greater sage grouse to the microscopic soil microbes adds its own melody, the loss of any one of which leaves a devastating silence.
Image credit: Joan Friedlander
Ecological dynamics and social facilitation
My PhD research now at The University of Queensland focuses on how extreme temperature events affect ecological dynamics. While previously I was analysing the interweaving melodies of disparate organisms at a single moment in time, my objective now is to understand how disturbances can alter those melodies over brief and long periods. Are they able to re-form with the same strength as before, do they modulate into new harmonies, or are they lost? With my primary advisor Dr Simon Hart and Professor Richard Fuller, I am looking at the effects of heatwaves from the level of single species and their individual music in lab experiments to the global symphonic level across continents and hemispheres using huge datasets.
I am excited to explore these questions about ecological networks over the next few years and just as excited to facilitate collaborative and social networks within the CBCS community. As a student in CBCS during the first year of my PhD at UQ, I loved getting to know people and their research through CBCS events. Now as an HDR representative, I am eager to take an active role in facilitating those connections between students, faculty and external groups to amplify our voices, joy and impact.
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