What we built together.

“I don’t know what that means…”.

After weeks of chasing down an increasingly well-known professor, arranging a zoom call and working up the nerve to ask him to be my mentor, this is the answer I got from Thomas W. Crowther . But it wasn’t an answer of rejection, it was a commitment by someone with too much to do and too little time to earnestly add me, someone he didn’t know, to his community.

“…but why don’t you start coming to lab meetings and we can see where it takes us”.

That was early 2021 and, in the following, 4 years Tom has become more than my professor, more than my supervisor or my boss, he has become my friend. Our relationship has never been one of hierarchy and always one of exchange. I have advised him just as much as he has advised me and eventually, I began to feel ownership of the things that we were creating together. Not we, Tom and I, but we, the entire community of people within the Crowther Lab. The beauty of this relationship is that it was not unique, it was what Tom genuinely tried to foster with every single person who walked into his orbit. Old or young, man or woman, scientist or banker, Tom believed in the power of positive relationships to drive impact for the cause he believed in: to protect the earth and the people who live on it.?

Despite a lifelong passion for nature and the study of how it works, by the time I was nearing the end of my master’s degree I resented science as an institution. The stifling egocentrism of scientists unwilling to admit what they don’t understand or the limits of what they do. The reductionism of this fantastic paradise we get to call home into quantifiable parts. The ruthless pressure to publish as if it were the production of knowledge, and not the pursuit of it, that drives the curious mind. The stress that so many colleagues feel their supervisors abandon them to due to lack of capacity, or care, or both. The elitism that shuns alternative ways of knowing and anything not of some imaginary caliber. The arrogance to think that science’s only role is to diagnose while someone else should do the hard work of actually changing things.

Needless to say I did not want to undertake a PhD.

But in Tom and the group that he worked so tirelessly to build, I found the opposite of all these things. I found humility and genuine love for nature and people. I found an atmosphere that promoted and rewarded creative thought, no matter the timeline. I found support and care and a social network. I found dedication to driving positive change and to the people who make it possible. We, the large and boisterous 40-some community that made up the Crowther Lab, were genuinely doing something different. It was exciting and intoxicating and it was good. So I stayed and I am proud to say that I did. It has been my pleasure and my honor to work with Tom and the rest of the Crowther Lab.

Now we are to lose this and I cannot help but grieve for this group and these people who have given me so much. I am hurting for my community, for myself and for my friend.

So, Tom, for someone who doesn’t “know what that means”, you have ended up being one hell of a Mentor.

Thank you.