Marshall Sherfield Fellow Born and raised in Hawaii, Ryan left paradise to attend college at Lawrence, a small liberal-arts college in Appleton, Wisconsin. After four years of bratwurst, cheesecurds and some rather invigorating winters, he moved to Massachusetts for yet another cultural and climatic shift. There, he received a PhD in Biology from Harvard University using native Californian snapdragons as a model system to investigate the role of pollinators in flower evolution and plant speciation. His lifelong interest in the natural history of the Hawaiian Islands was what propelled him into biology but the extended time spent in locales such as northern California, Spain and Costa Rica as part of his graduate work was a definite bonus. Continuing his eastward migration, Ryan will spend his Marshall-Sherfield Fellowship at the John Innes Center for Plant Research studying the genetic regulation of the anthocyanin pathway.