Dan Bush, a renowned plant biologist and former chair of the Department of Biology and vice provost for faculty affairs at CSU, was recently named a pioneer member for the American Society of Plant Biology (ASPB).
This prestigious recognition honors the work of researchers who have made significant contributions to the field of plant science and the scientific community, and who take seriously the mentorship of future researchers. The recognition includes fundraising of $5,000 by the member’s former graduate students, postdocs, colleagues and friends that is used to support outreach and mentorship of young scientists.
“Dan has been a tremendous mentor and friend to me. His impact on plant science is only overshadowed by his positive impacts on his mentees,” said Cris Argueso, an associate professor of agricultural biology at CSU.
Bush said that the ASPB had a profound impact on his career and development as a plant biologist. He attended his first society meeting in 1983, coincidentally held at CSU.
“I was awestruck by the diversity of plant science presented at the meeting,” he said. “The society played a central role in my career … ASPB has had a profoundly positive impact on the plant biology discipline and I am proud of my service to the society.”
Throughout Bush’s career, he took on leadership roles within ASPB: organizing annual meetings, serving on the editorial board on the society’s journal, chairing the Midwest section of the society, elected secretary and president of the society, and serving as chair of the board of trustees.
“Dr. Dan Bush is a visionary scientist and a leader with a tireless commitment to advancing science, especially plant biology,” said Anireddy S.N. Reddy, professor of biology at CSU. “His decades of distinguished service and contributions to the plant science community at the national and international level in many leadership roles in different societies, including the ASPB, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and at Colorado State University, are impressive.”
Career ethos
Beyond ASPB, Bush’s career ethos was marked by a strong sense of scientific inquiry, collaboration and thoughtful mentorship.
He started as an art student at Humboldt State University in California (HSU), before finding inspiration from his first mentor, Dan Brant, a biology professor at HSU. “Brant lived a life of inquiry,” said Bush. “He had an enormous curiosity about everything … I spent a summer building a house with him and shortly thereafter became a biology major!”
Bush later earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley and did postdoctoral research at the University of Maryland.
He joined the Agricultural Research Service and the Plant Biology Department at the University of Illinois in 1984 where he made his first significant research achievements describing the transport properties of proton-coupled sucrose and amino acid transporters in purified membrane vesicles, and eventually cloning many of them by complementing yeast transport mutants with plant cDNA expression libraries. It was also at Illinois that he discovered sucrose is a signal molecule that controls carbon allocation from leaf tissue to the non-photosynthetic organs of the plant.
“While I consider these and many other discoveries to be important contributions to plant science, I believe my most important contributions have been in the training of many Ph.D. and postdoctoral students,” he wrote in his autobiography for ASPB. “I am exceedingly proud of their successes and contributions to basic understanding of plant biology.”
This philosophy of mentorship extended beyond lab work and into his classroom as well.
“As an educator, I tried to assist students in engaging in active learning, as I helped them build a foundation of basic concepts and knowledge of biological systems. One of the challenges of any biology class is walking students through the depth of understanding we have of many biological processes while also exciting them about the plethora of unsolved biological questions,” he said.
Bush brought this passion for plant biology education to CSU, where he served as chair of the Department of Biology from 2003 – 2012. In 2012 he became vice provost for faculty affairs, where he served CSU until his retirement in 2020.
“As chair of biology, I am very proud of the many talented young faculty we hired and our conscious efforts to mentor them as they crafted their successful careers at CSU,” he said. “Many are now leaders in their fields and at CSU. As vice provost for faculty affairs, I am very proud of our work with departments making sure they set clear expectations for young faculty. It is exceeding important that young faculty understand the expectations for scholarly and teaching achievement, as well as their role as engaged citizens in academia.”
Bush said he feels extremely lucky to have spent a career engaged in solving challenging scientific questions, working with likeminded colleagues and training the next generation of inquiry-driven plant scientists.
Read more about Bush’s legacy in his biography and on SOURCE.
