Meet our faculty: Hannah Marx

Academic focus: Alpine botany, biodiversity, museum science

Research summary: My research aims to understand the ecological and evolutionary processes that generate and maintain biodiversity across space and time in alpine “sky islands” on mountaintops. In my lab we use data collected during field expeditions, leveraged from existing biodiversity repositories and through recent advances in genomics to address specific hypotheses of community assembly and comparative phylogeography. My long-term goal is to develop actionable scientific tools for predicting and managing changes to plant diversity.

What do you like to do when you’re not working?

Running, hiking, backpacking, skiing and botanizing. Spending as much time exploring outside with my family and our dog. I also enjoy making jewelry.  

What are your current outreach/extension projects?

Central to my work is the development and utilization of herbaria (botanical museums). Herbaria constitute a special type of time capsule, where pressed and dried plants collected all over the world are housed together and store information about past and present biodiversity. My research uses plant collections held in herbaria – including the L.H. Bailey Herbarium at Cornell – to understand how plant communities change across space and time. I also work with others to think of new and creative ways to use these collections for research and education.

What are three adjectives people might use to describe you?

Adventurous, curious, intentional

What brought you to Cornell CALS?

I’ve spent my career studying plant biodiversity and was seeking ways to expand the scope and significance of my work. Cornell CALS has invested in building a hub for biodiversity research that is truly transdisciplinary and actionable with the Empowering Biodiversity for People and Planet moonshot, and I was excited to be at the forefront of this mission.

What do you think is important for people to understand about your field?

Mountains are often called sentinels of change because they are sensitivity to climate shifts and provide early evidence of global environmental changes. Our planet is undergoing increasingly rapid change, and ecosystems that we see today will never be the same. It is critical to document where plants and other species are found now so we can have a baseline to assess changes and establish the foundation for a biodiversity catalog to fuel new discoveries.  

Why did you feel inspired to pursue a career in this field? 

I was first motivated to pursue a career in botanical research when my brother was being treated with a chemotherapy drug developed from a compound originally discovered in a plant. I realized we have barely tapped the surface of understanding plant diversity. To help inform applied research, I wanted to contribute knowledge to our basic understanding of plant ecology and evolution.  

What’s the most surprising/interesting thing you’ve discovered about Cornell and/or Ithaca so far?

There is an apple vending machine in the building where my office is located (Mann Library) where you can purchase fresh local apples for $1. I learned these machines have been offering different apple varieties at Cornell since the 1950s.

If you had unlimited grant funding, what major problem in your field would you want to solve?

I would formulate a series of endowments to sustain student research at undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral levels, making sure there are resources available for the next generation to work toward creative solutions to our ongoing and future challenges. 

If you could relate your work to one of the four transdisciplinary moonshots, which one would you most closely align with and why? They are: Redesigning 21st Century Agri-Food Systems; Accelerating Holistic Climate Solutions; Leading in Synthetic Biology; and Pioneering Life Science Breakthroughs.

My work on alpine ecosystems includes exploring functional mechanisms of survival and adaptation to extreme alpine environments, providing insights that align with the Pioneering Life Science Breakthroughs and could be applied to Accelerating Holistic Climate Solutions.