Kim Medley

she/her
Tyson Director
Team Vibes and Mosquito Team

How does this summer compare to the other summers at Tyson that you've seen?

It all feels very robust, very alive. It's the biggest cohort of undergraduates to date, and you can feel that. Also, a lot of the PIs — Rachel Penczykowski, and Jonathan Myers, Kasey Fowler-Finn and myself — have been successful in getting grant money this last year. There's something about that that just sort of validates what we’re doing. This is my 10th year in the director role, and we've worked so hard to put things in place, including supporting people in addition to growing our research programs. Without taking credit away from Jonathan and Rachel and Kasey, who have written the grant proposals, I feel like we've worked so hard for a decade to put things in place to make those things possible… I'm getting goosebumps right now.

So it feels like we've made it. The people that work here are becoming very successful. To me, that’s one litmus of success at a place like Tyson: how successful the people that use the site are, in their careers and in their research. And it's really just so fun to see people grow in their roles. When you give people space and tools and credit, they can thrive.

What are you excited about at Tyson right now?

I'm super excited to see Erin O'Connell running her own team in collaboration with Doug [Ladd]. I'm loving that she came up with the flora project — that’s something that Tyson, as a field station, needs, right? And there's been a lot of synergy among teams. Rachel and I and Katie are working on microclimate. There's the collaboration between Kasey and I, and there's Beth and Solny's team. Team Flora might be working with Team Vibes on plant identification in the prairies. We’re also wanting to do some work on insect diversity in the ForestGEO plot. I don't even know if we're gonna pull that off, but there's still this synergy going on across teams that I haven't quite seen like this before. So it's like everybody's talking and collaborating. It’s fabulous.

Can you talk a bit more about Team Vibes?

The Living Earth Collaborative came online about five years ago now, and one of the key parts was the postdoctoral program, where postdocs were mentored by folks across institutions. I ended up co-mentoring a postdoc with Kasey Fowler-Finn, and her bread and butter is insect communication and acoustics. I have some expertise in geospatial analysis, so as we started thinking about this project, our work intersected in a really cool way. And then it got funded! We worked hard over several months to put together a grant proposal for NSF. Usually you're sitting for six months to wait on an answer, but we heard back maybe two months later that they wanted to fund it. That was about a month before summer started, so we scrambled to get a team together in time to do the work this summer.

I'm heading up the geospatial aspect of that, working closely with Amani [Griffin] and Yoshi [Yajima]. It's an amazing project, and I give all the credit to Kasey because the overall idea was hers.