The WNMU campus office of Manda Jost seems reflective of the mind of the biology professor who occupies it. There are specimens floating in glass jars on the desk, nineteenth-century natural history texts on the bookshelves, and curious and colorful works of art that reflect diverse, wide-ranging travels. In this eclectic space, where the boundaries between art and science blur, Jost’s multifaceted background shapes her approach to biology as she encourages a new generation of students to explore the natural world.
“I am a first-generation American on my mother’s side,” said Jost, reflecting on her diverse heritage that spans continents and cultures, including her mother’s home country of Chile. Her family’s background has shaped her worldview and fueled her passion for exploration.
Jost’s upbringing in Houston, TX, was a blend of cultural diversity and the avant-garde, with roots extending from Ukrainian and Belorussian Jews to Chilean and Mennonite heritage. “There was a lot of art and culture and music in my childhood,’ she recalled, attributing her eclectic interests to her family’s influence. “I grew up with kind of avant-garde, fringy kind of parents. I think a lot of that was really formative for me.”
Along with her parents, her Chilean grandparents were also an influence. “My grandparents from Chile were both highly educated individuals, both worldly, and they had books and artifacts. This aesthetic,” Jost said, referring to her eclectic office décor, “with books, and specimens, and artifacts that came from travels—that was my grandparents’ house.”
This upbringing inspired Jost’s interest in language and the arts. “I was far, far more artistically inclined than I was scientifically inclined,” she said, “I loved nature, but I also loved design.”
Despite her early affinity for the arts, Jost’s fascination with nature was ignited during her frequent childhood visits to Costa Rica, which introduced her to the wonders of tropical biodiversity. “Costa Rica has more lizards, insects, and plants than you can wrap your head around,” she said.
Her family also travelled frequently to New Mexico, leading them to eventually move to Cloudcroft when Jost was a teenager. The move from a highly diverse, urban school in Houston to rural Cloudcroft was bit of a shock for Jost, and at the end of high school she felt a strong pull to see more of the world, so she became an exchange student in Germany.
“This is something I try to tell my students: As soon as you have an opportunity to travel internationally, do it,” she said. International travel, she emphasized, allows one to experience a world “where everything is different—from the art to the architecture to the language to the food. Birds sound differently; the smells are different. It was transformative to me to be an exchange student for a year.”
When she started college, she was uncertain what to major in and took a wide variety of courses, ranging from old English literature to sociology and from astronomy to philosophy. While she enjoyed the diversity of her coursework, she wanted to challenge herself with new experiences, so after a year at NMSU, Jost found herself at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she decided to student zoology and anthropology. Jost said she was looking for a subject “where you are looking for an objective truth, which doesn’t require imposing your culture or your thoughts or your feelings on top of it.”
In addition to her coursework, Jost became an NCAA varsity fencer and she joined with friends to form a rock band. “During that slice of American history—the 1990s—everyone was in a band,” she explained, “So I got into a band.” For five years, Jost was the lead guitarist and singer of what she described as a “pretty rowdy rock and roll band.” Among the many places her band played during that time was CBGBs, the legendary punk rock club in New York, where they performed multiple times.
She graduated from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst with a B.S. in zoology, a B.A. in anthropology, and a minor in linguistics. She was also a graduate of the university’s interdisciplinary film studies program.
For graduate school, Jost wanted to stay in Massachusetts, so she completed her Ph.D. at Harvard University, where she rubbed shoulders with scientific luminaries like Ernst Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould.
Jost said it was rather overwhelming to be a graduate student at Harvard during that time, but she also thoroughly enjoyed the resources the university offered students, especially the Museum of Comparative Zoology. The museum, she said, “just has such a long history of exploration and it has so many zoological collections and specimens and research. … That rich history was lovely to be surrounded by.”
She also took advantage of the research grants available and travelled to Madagascar, South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, and the Colombian and Ecuadoran Amazon to collect research specimens. Her research project involved collecting specimens to understand the evolution of acoustic communication of crickets and katydids. “I used a combination of anatomy, fossil records, DNA sequences and evolutionary trees to understand how the evolution of acoustic communication unfolded in those particular insects,” she said.
After completing her Ph.D. program, Jost spend some time at the University of Texas, Austin as a postdoctoral researcher and then soon after accepted the position at WNMU, where she became the university’s first female biology professor.
One of her goals as a professor has been to get students actively engaged in observing the world around them, taking advantage of the backyard laboratory that is the Gila but also venturing further abroad. She has led a number of research trips to Mexico, where students have been able to study tidal pools and marine life. While those trips were put on hold when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, she looks forward to restarting them once the university has ironed out some risk-management questions. It is important to her, she said, not only to help student understand the organisms they study but also “to get students to appreciate that very human process of putting on your boots and your backpack.”
Her students recently had an opportunity to do exactly this when Jost led a field trip to California where they explored the rocky intertidal shore of California, searching for diverse invertebrates during low tide. Jost described the trip as an “amazing experience that is also very much driven by an appreciation for the aesthetic beauty of biological diversity.” Jost added that the time on the coast was also “a classic field activity that I believe all life science students should experience: becoming overwhelmed with the tremendous and beautiful diversity of intertidal creatures hiding among the rocks at low tide.”
This process of experience and observation is key to her career as a biologist. Said Jost, “There is a strong visual aesthetic to the appeal of biology for me—the shape of a plant, of an insect, of a skeleton, of a tooth; the color of the feathers, the hair or exoskeleton. Biological diversity has really appealed to my very highly visual aesthetic sense, and I think that is what keeps me embedded in it.”