Office Hour: Jonathan Wilson

Photos by Patrick Montero.
The professor of environmental studies gives us a tour of his office.
Professor of Environmental Studies Jonathan Wilson is perfectly content to linger in the past. In his Sharpless Hall lab, Wilson’s focus is on the coevolution of plants and the environment over the past 475 million years. Using mathematical models, chemical analysis, and even experimental plant physiology, Wilson probes ecosystems’ responses to major events, like mass extinctions and climate change.
After receiving his Ph.D. in Earth and planetary sciences from Harvard, Wilson joined Haverford in 2011 to contribute to the College’s environmental studies and biology programs. He has since led the team that established the Bi-Co environmental studies major and department, which has quickly become one of the most popular majors at both schools.
Last spring, Wilson was promoted to full professor on the heels of receiving a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant allows Wilson, along with colleagues at Baylor University and Trinity College, to continue his investigation of ancient plant structures and the paleoclimate record. The work, he says, is critical as the world grapples with the existential threat of climate change.
“Understanding our vegetation and climate history helps us understand how to make better models of the past and the future, but it also helps people learn what’s happened on the planet in deep time,” Wilson says. “Knowing how different scenarios in the Earth’s history ended is important for understanding what humanity could be staring down.”

➊ Replica Pip-Boy: The fictional wristband computer is a fan favorite from the post-apocalyptic video game series Fallout, which has been a hit since the first installment debuted in 1997 and was recently spun into a hit Amazon Prime show. Wilson has played the games since he was a teenager. “I’ve had this in my office for years,” Wilson says of the replica. “Most people don’t notice it, but the students who do say, ‘Wow, you’re a real person!’”

➋ Promotional photograph of Laura Dern: In 1993’s Jurassic Park, Dern plays Dr. Ellie Sattler, a role Wilson believes is the only instance of a paleobotanist being portrayed on the silver screen. Wilson often points to Dern’s character when he meets new people to help them understand his research. “She’s an icon for my field,” he says. “One of my sisters is an actress, and I’ve joked for years that I’m going to leverage her connections for a meeting to get it signed. Meeting Laura Dern would be a real honor.”

➌ Cacao pods from Trinidad: Wilson regularly takes students in his botany classes on experiential learning trips over spring break to Trinidad and Tobago as a way to reinforce the role plants play in our biological, social, and cultural history. Throughout the week, students see the plants they’ve studied in Wilson’s lab flourishing in their natural habitat. “When we go to Trinidad, we look at cacao agriculture,” he says. “Inside are actual cacao beans, which are what are processed into chocolate.”

➍ A 2.7-billion-year-old rock: Throughout his office, Wilson has oodles of fossils and rocks from around the world. He picked up this one, a sample of banded iron formation, in Western Australia. “It was formed before there was oxygen in the atmosphere, so that’s why it looks like a little brick wall,” Wilson says. The different layers are iron and silica, which are mined to fuel the country’s steel industry.

➎ Champagne bottles and Tibetan prayer flags:The series of empty bottles atop a bookshelf in Wilson’s office denote major milestones in his career, from tenure to his receipt of major grants. The most recent was popped when he became a full professor last spring. Woven between them is a set of traditional Tibetan prayer flags Wilson acquired during a 2019 trip to Southern China along its border with Tibet.

➏ Oblique Strategies: Developed by musicians Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt in 1975, Oblique Strategies is a deck of 100 cards with short suggestions or courses of action intended to spur creative thinking. Wilson leaves them on the table in the middle of his office for students, though he often turns to the deck himself for inspiration. “When I have a student who comes and is stuck on something, I’ll hand the deck to them,” he says. “This doesn’t give you the answer, but it might just get you to think differently.”

➐ A photo from Mistaken Point, Newfoundland: One of Wilson’s first field trips while he was an undergrad at Johns Hopkins University was to Newfoundland. Mistaken Point, which juts into the North Atlantic Ocean, features countless fossils of early animals, some formed as long as 580 million years ago, scattered across its surface.

➑ CDs in Wilson’s lab: When any student begins working in his lab, Wilson asks them to select an album, which he purchases, labels with the student’s name, and adds to the growing collection. They range from David Bowie—one of Wilson’s favorites—to obscure indie bands. “The only rule we have in the lab is that if you pick Queen, we’re only allowed to listen to ‘We Are the Champions’ once per day,” Wilson says.