Presented with a $300,000, no-strings grant this week, Sharon B. Emerson said she felt as if she had won "the science Powerball."
A reporter protested that unlike the Powerball multistate lottery, the MacArthur Fellowship she won is based on brains, not luck."Regardless of how many brains there are involved, there is a lot of luck," she fired back.
The response was typical of Emerson, a 49-year-old research professor of biology at the University of Utah. She is extraordinarily modest.
Emerson was one of 24 Americans announced this week as winners of this years's MacArthur Fellowships, commonly called "genius grants." The fellowships are not solicited, and grantees don't even know they are being considered.
The funds are disbursed to help people "who have the capacity for creativity and for making important contributions to society," according to the foundation.
But don't expect Emerson to say that. She's too self-effacing to talk about her own talents.
During an interview, she didn't bring up the fact that in 1993 she was elected chairwoman of the Division of Vertebrate Morphology of the American Society of Zoologists.
She didn't volunteer that she also served a yearlong stint as director of the National Science Foundation's Functional and Physiological Ecology program.
You'd have to ask about the copies of "The Journal of Mammalogy" dating back to 1964, and the dozens of mammal books lining the bookshelves in her lab, to get her to mention that 20 years ago she was curator of mammals at the Los Angeles Zoo.
But a question about the frog knickknacks on shelves and computer-top - like the toy frog with a watch in its mouth - brings a musical laugh and the response, "When you work on frogs, lots of people give you frog presents. I have a big collection of frog presents."
Emerson works part of the year in that cluttered, windowless laboratory tucked among a maze of rooms in the lower reaches of the U.'s Biology Building. The rest of the time she conducts field research in the jungles of Borneo, often lying beneath tarps in the steaming heat, studying exotic frogs.
Her specialty is functional morphology - the way appendages like jaws and limbs have evolved to accomplish various tasks.
She began working in Borneo about 10 years ago, "trying to put together the mechanical analysis with the natural history." She wanted to learn "what the animals were doing out in the field."
A present study involves the fanged frogs of Borneo, she said.
Frogs with fangs? Really?
Emerson quickly searched through cardboard boxes on her lab table, opening them and glancing at the clean frog bones inside. With their broad arrowhead-shaped skulls, they had an alien beauty. She pulled out half of a lower jawbone and showed it off.
Protruding from the bone was a tiny spike - one of the fangs. She prodded it thoughtfully with a finger.
Emerson is learning how the frogs' testosterone levels, fangs and size interact to influence their behavior.
The boxes of skeletons share her work table with bottled and pickled frogs.
"I'm interested in the evolution of unusual features," she said.
Among the peculiar features that fascinate her are "parachutes" used by the flying frogs of Borneo. These arboreal frogs have "unusually large hands and feet, and they also have small flaps of skin on their arms and legs," she said.
The frogs live at the tops of the rainforests, in parts of the forest canopy that may be 200 feet above the ground. But they need to return to the forest floor periodically in order to lay their eggs in water.
To do that, they leap from the treetops and use their huge feet and hands to slow their fall.
Wanting to know more about the frogs' ability to glide, Emerson and fellow scientist Mimi A.R. Koehl - who, coincidentally, won a MacArthur Fellowship herself in 1990 - built a wind tunnel and models of the amphibians.
"We could put pieces on and take pieces off" the models, testing how their aerodynamics changed with the addition of flaps at particular places. Using the wind tunnel, they made predictions about how the animals use these strange structures in jumping.
Then they made some projections about how the actual frogs would glide.
"It's not distance so much that's important, it's maneuverability," she said.
On the glide down, the frogs needed to avoid vines, branches and other obstacles in the jungle. They had to maneuver "to get through all this dense vegetation," Emerson said.
She and Koehl found that their predictions about the frogs' glides were accurate.
What neither scientist could have predicted is that they both would ultimately win MacArthur Fellowships.
"It's a pretty big surprise," Emerson said.