Message from the Director

Fall is properly here, despite what the weather on campus might suggest, and we've got our hands full preparing for our two big upcoming events: ID Day and the Farrand Lecture! I'm especially excited about everything our wonderful team and partners have done to make these events extra-special, since this is the 25th year we've done both programs. 

You'll read more about the Farrand Lecture in this newsletter's Special Feature, so I'll keep this short and sweet-enjoy the interview, and I hope to see you at the events! (If you want to do me a big favor, RSVP for the Farrand Lecture at this link to help us prepare.)

--
Lucie Howell, Director

This Month at the Museum

Fridays and Saturdays, 5pm, 6pm, 7pm
Laser Queen

October 5, 11am–4pm
ID Day

October 9
5:30pm: Farrand Lecture reception at UMMNH
6:30pm: Farrand Lecture: ScentStories at CCCB Auditorium

October 22, 5:30–7:30pm
Science Café: A Tale of Two Libraries

Weekend Programs

 Schedule subject to change. No tours or demos on Oct. 5 or 12. No demos on Oct. 11.

12:30 p.m.: Out of the Water and Back Again: A Whale's Tale [Demo]
1:30 p.m.: Museum Highlights Tour (Saturdays) / Walking With Whales Tour (Sundays)
2:30 p.m.: Out of the Water and Back Again: A Whale's Tale [Demo]

Click here to see the up-to-date planetarium schedule for this month.

Special Feature: ScentStories

In preparation for our upcoming Farrand Lecture: ScentStories event, we spoke to the three experts featured on the ScentStories panel. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Thais filing a specimen at the U-M Herbarium

UMMNH: How would you describe your work?

Dr. Thais Vasconcelos: I’m the Director of the U-M Herbarium. Basically, I’m the guardian of all the collections! I try to make sure that all of them are going to be preserved forever, that we have a steady intake of new collections, and that we are using them in a responsible way for research and education. 

I study plant biodiversity, so my research is totally focused on understanding the ecology and evolution of plants-and the Herbarium specimens are a key part of that. I can get all the different types of data that I need for my research from them, where they occur, what they look like, and what their biology is like, across thousands of species all in the same place.  

Dr. Aly Baumgartner: I am one of two Collection Managers of Vascular Plants. I like to describe myself as a “dead plant librarian”-which is quite a job! In the Herbarium, we have roughly 1.5 million specimens and so managing them, taking care of them, is literally a full-time job. 

A lot of what I do is physically working with the specimens, taking them out for people who want to look at them, replacing the ones that people have returned, updating information in our database as things are re-identified, and helping different groups of people to understand the Herbarium.  

Michelle Krell Kydd: I'm a writer, speaker, and sensorialist who specializes in decoding flavors and fragrances. I've done sensory work in Ann Arbor since 2012-I worked with 826michigan when I first moved here. I've worked with students of all ages across neural perspectives. 

We gloss over smell in science. I have a TEDx talk at [U-M] saying smell is memory sense, and memory is identity, and I stand by that! 

UMMNH: How did you discover this work?

TV: I started to work in a herbarium as an undergraduate student, so pretty much my first research experience as a college student was in a herbarium. At that time, I was looking at the herbarium more as a place to deposit the specimens that I was collecting, in the sense of making a record that these species of plants occurred in an area. My use of the collections evolved as a Masters student and as a PhD student, but all the research I was doing was based on herbarium specimens in different ways.  

AB: My background is in paleobotany, so I have historically been seen as a nontraditional herbarium user. The focus of herbaria has often been on looking at the specimens, studying them, and giving them names; that really is the core of most herbarium collections, basically trying to know “who the plants are.”

That is very much not my interest! Well, professionally, as a herbarium collection manager it is, but that was not where my research perspective was coming from. I was interested in looking at woody plants from tropical Africa, but I didn’t care who they were, I just wanted to study things from that region. And that meant that I actually have been ghosted by herbaria before, because people didn’t know who was responsible for answering my question! 

Because I had this alternative perspective, it meant that I understood more of the collections side of herbaria than your typical researcher would. One of my big goals is to make the Herbarium accessible to more people, because so many people don’t even know we exist. 

Aly examining a plant specimen from Queensland, Australia

MKK: I didn't start out in this area. I had a background in communications, sales, and marketing; I was selling ads when no-one wanted to buy them on the internet. I had contacts in the beauty industry through that job, but also-I've been led by the sense of smell since I was a child. I was asked to attend an event for a fragrance called Individuel by Montblanc, and I was like: you know that I'm the ad director here, but I'll happily go, I'll take notes, whatever you want. The editor said, "I know you'll like it, because you're a smell person!"

I go in and, long story short, a guy named Walter Johnson was teaching a class. He showed all the raw materials so we could smell them blind, and I identified twenty out of twenty-three. 

He said: you need to get trained, there are FIT [Fashion Institute of Technology] courses you should take, this is what you should do. And that's what I did. So, speaking of access, that wouldn't have happened to a person who worked outside the industry-I said yes to something that I probably wouldn't have been invited to. Prior to fragrance blogs, the industry was very closed, and not open to talking to anyone who wasn't affiliated with a magazine or a newspaper of record or some research journal. They got rocked when social media started; they just didn't know what to do! I wrote a page for Perfumer & Flavorist about exposing the perfumer and what was happening at that time. It’s less secretive now, but you have to work in the industry to get industry training. 

UMMNH: What are you most excited to share with the ScentStories audience?

TV: I’ll be talking about the plant family that I specialize in, Myrtaceae. All of the six thousand species in Myrtaceae have oil glands in their leaves, so I’m going to talk about when I started to be able to distinguish them in the field just from the way they smell. Hopefully, the audience will have a similar experience to the one I had when I was starting my career, when I was in the field trying to recognize plants just by looking at that vast amount of green in the jungle, and how scent guided me through that. 

AB: This has been incredibly validating for me, because I have been talking about sense tours or smell tours of the Herbarium for years. In the Herbarium, you don’t expect to interact with the plants by smell-that seems like an outside sort of thing! So the fact that you can open a cabinet and know that “Oh, yes, this is where the eucalyptus is stored” is so much fun. For example, I recently discovered that the Allium cabinet smells very strongly of onions, to the point where I had to finish up working in there quickly because it was too much! 

It’s been so much fun, and my colleagues who thought this was kind of a weird idea are now very supportive of this endeavor, and I’m thrilled.  

MKK: The intersection of botany and smells is a natural fit. I've always wanted to collaborate on something like that on campus; recently, I got pulled into a little bit of machine learning and artificial intelligence research that's informed by smell. And then when I was approached by somebody who was coming to [Smell & Tell at the Ann Arbor District Library] class, it really hit me about the sense of community here-being in a university town, how wonderful it is. And I say this as a New Yorker! 

I’ve started to recognize something: when people describe their sensory impressions in class, connections start forming between them. Not because they’re all doing the same thing, but because as soon as they start sharing their memories, they’re revealing things about themselves and the material they’re smelling. It’s beautiful to watch. 

UMMNH: Are there any scent memories that are particularly meaningful or powerful for you?

TV: Since we’re talking about the Herbarium and plants, one smell that I’ve always like was the smell of the herbarium where I did my PhD, at Kew Gardens in London. It’s just a mixture of dried blends of paper-they don’t use mothballs there, so it’s not a mothball scent like we have here. But every time that I would stay away for a little bit, I would come back to continue my herbarium-based research, and it would be like-ahhhh, I love this smell! It was the best smell, for sure.  

AB: Ponderosa pine. I spent several summers throughout my academic career living in the Black Hills of South Dakota or the Front Range in Colorado. In those places, you’ll come across ponderosa pines, and there’s nothing quite like giving a big ol’ hug to a sun-warmed ponderosa pine trunk and just smelling its complicated smell. It’s like cream soda, but also just a little bit of turpentine, because it is still a pine tree. My friends have definitely taken pictures of me hugging as many of these ponderosa pines as I possibly can, and I get really disappointed when I come across varieties that don’t have a smell. It’s such a powerful memory for me; it’s something I look back to fondly, and I’m always looking for excuses to smell it again. 

MKK: I had a teacher in the fifth grade who took us to the Botanic Garden in Brooklyn, and there was the Garden for the Blind [now the Alice Recknagel Ireys Fragrance Garden] there for children. Everything was low-level, and there were Braille plaques in addition to English that told you what plants were there. There was a leaf that was green, and it purportedly smelled like lemon-which made no sense in my child mind! I was ten at the time, and I thought: how can something green smell yellow? So I pinched this leaf; I rubbed it, and I smelled it, and I closed my eyes, and I saw the sun.

Behind the Scenes: Museum Updates

Visitors can now see some of the original George Marchand models for our Cretaceous diorama in the Window Gallery!

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