In 1996 a few hundred plant scientists gathered in Baton Rouge, La., for an annual phylogenetics meeting. Biology undergraduate Dennis Wall rushed into a lecture hall to meet Brent Mishler, a University of California, Berkeley, integrative biologist, who was considering taking on Wall as a doctoral student. But when Wall, late and disheveled, tried to climb over a row of folding chairs to get a closer seat, he tripped, and the chairs crumbled beneath him. When he got up, applause filled the auditorium.
Researchers including Mishler, who became Wall's PhD advisor, say Wall would continue to surprise them—academically, that is—for years to come.
As a PhD student, Wall tracked the radiation of an obscure genus of moss from its origin in Malaysia to its outermost ranges in French Polynesia. He wanted to see how quickly branches in the moss's lineage arose and decided to use statistical ...
