Education and Early Career
Jake was first drawn to ecology after conducting research assessing different restoration techniques on a restored wetland site at Oberlin College. Prior to coming to Minnesota, Jake served as an environmental educator and agroforestry extensionist with the Peace Corps in Paraguay from 2009-2011 and completed a Master’s in Forest Resources in International Forestry at the University of Washington. Through those experiences of hands-on work as well as reading research papers by Dr. David Tilman using Cedar Creek as a study site, Jake found himself pursuing ecology and working at Cedar Creek as a graduate student under the mentorship of FAB PI Dr. Jeannine Cavender-Bares. Jake graduated in 2018 from the University of Minnesota with a Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior. Currently, Jake is an Assistant Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies at St. Olaf College, where he also mentors student researchers. As a plant ecophysiologist, Jake focuses on how trees and other woody plants withstand cold and drought conditions in the context of biodiversity loss and other global change factors.
Connections to Cedar Creek
In the summer of 2013, Jake was recruited by Dr. Jeannine Cavender-Bares as a graduate student to help establish FAB 1, the High Density Forest and Biodiversity Experiment at Cedar Creek. He spent four summers at Cedar Creek, also serving as a mentor to undergraduate students at the reserve prior to the establishment of the current Summer Fellows program. Jake currently works as a faculty researcher and FAB leader under the LTER research grant at Cedar Creek. He includes students in his research on how temperate forests are responding to climate change through the Grossman Lab.
Representation in Science
Jake is very vocal about his own identities and the ways in which they shape him as a person and as a scientist. He considers himself to have many privileged or “power” identities as well as more marginalized identities, however his powerful identities tend to be most salient. Jake’s identities as a white, able-bodied, cisgender man are most visible to others, while his identities as a practicing Jew and a gay man are more hidden, but still shape the ways in which he interacts with the world and his work.
In an interview, Jake shared that he is inspired by Dr. Wren Walker Robbins, a Two-spirit Mohawk science educator and former mentor of Jake’s who has worked extensively in tribal and underrepresented communities. Working with her, Jake came to the role of a “bridge person”, someone who has a foot in different communities and therefore can bring together different identities and ways of seeing the world. Jake has adopted this philosophy in his work, especially in his teaching. “I have predominantly white students, and I draw on my identities as a white ethnic minority to model antiracism for my white students and invite them to join me in decolonizing and doing antiracist work. I think that I draw a lot of personal resistance and strength from the complex nature of my identity in doing that type of work.” Jake also draws on his own sexual and gender identities as a queer person to encourage his students to be feminists and to combat transphobic or heteronormative ways of thinking.
Jake believes that small acts of inclusion and representation are essential for creating a more accepting and welcoming world: “No realistic theory of change involves total transformation of all parts of the system, and I think creating safe spaces, including at Cedar Creek, is a really powerful way of building broader change.”
Select Publications
Grossman, J.J., H.B. Coe, O. Fey, N. Fraser, M. Salaam, C. Semper, and C.G. Williamson. Temperate woody species across the angiosperm phylogeny acquire tolerance to water deficit stress during the growing season. New Phytologist 242: 1981-1995.
Grossman, J. J. (2023). Phenological physiology: seasonal patterns of plant stress tolerance in a changing climate. New Phytologist, 237(5): 1508-1524.
Grossman, J. J., Vanhellemont, M., Barsoum, N., Bauhus, J., Bruelheide, H., Castagneyrol, B., Cavender-Bares, J., Eisenhauer, N., Ferlian, O., Gravel, D., Hector, A., Jactel, H., Kreft, H., Mereu, S., Messier, C., Muys, B., Nock, C., Paquette, A., Parker, J., & Perring, M. P. (2018). Synthesis and future research directions linking tree diversity to growth, survival, and damage in a global network of tree diversity experiments. Environmental and Experimental Botany, 152, 68–89.
Acknowledgement
A special thanks to Dr. Jake Grossman for allowing us to interview him for this profile!