Quacking The Case On UC Santa Cruz EEB’s Abe Borker!

I had the privilege of taking BIOE 20F: Introduction to Field Biology with Dr. Abe Borker last quarter, which was my first quarter at  UCSC –– this is how I initially met Abe. This class was super affirming to me that I wanted to be a Marine Biologist and do research, so in choosing a person for my interview, Abe was the first person that came to mind. 

On March 14, 2024, we hopped on a call to do the interview. We initially had a meeting set up, but due to unforeseen circumstances, we had to move it to the phone. Either way, Abe was still, more than willing to take the time to talk even during his busy end-of-the-quarter schedule. 

Dr. Abe Borker is an Assistant Teaching Professor a part of the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) Department at UC Santa Cruz. He is a bird enthusiast and is all about conservation and protecting biodiversity on this beautiful planet. 

Before the interview, Abe and I caught up and I gave him some more context about Slugs for Biology. Because the interview was on call, I wasn’t able to see Abe, but I could feel his excitement and presentness just by his voice and interactions with what I shared.

“Alright, are you ready for some questions?”

“Yeah! Yeah, let’s do it.”

Getting right into it, “Where did you grow up? And what’d you like about it?” 

With pride in his voice, Abe shares, “I was born in Brooklyn, New York, sort of downtown. I grew up there and I love New York City. New York is a core part of my identity, the only hard part is finding nature in it. But it pushed me to think about how small urban parks and little ways nature is incredibly resilient in one of the densest most populated parts of our country. Still all these really cool vibrant ecologies and things happening.”

No matter, the passion you can always find some small part of it in wherever you are. Just by the way he speaks about the city, I could feel the love and pride he has for New York –– my curiosity took over in asking “Would you ever move back?”

Hesitating for a second, he expressed, “If I didn’t love my job at UC Santa Cruz so much, I think I would. When I came to California, 15 years ago, I just fell in love with all the biodiversity here. We live in just amazing Mediterranean climate with unparalleled levels of biodiversity. So in my dream world, I could live in New York City, but study the nature in California. But I’m willing to settle and live here.”

“Where did you go to college for undergrad, and what did you major in?” 

“The State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry, in Syracuse, New York.” (SUNY ESF)

Amazed by the length, I laughed and let out a “WOW!”

Sharing a slight chuckle Abe continues, “I say the whole name because it’s a weird privilege to be the longest name of any college in the country. I started as an Environmental Forrest Biology major. When I was there, they created a Conservation Biology Major, so I immediately jumped over to that because it added some courses around conservation and how conservation happens, which was sort of my main interest going to school there.”

Just with a few of my questions being answered, I could understand and feel more of his passion for teaching and the environment. He enjoys what he does so much so, that he even went to a school specializing in his interests. Abe’s passion dives deeper than just college, but even into his youth. When asked what his first memory was that made him want to pursue the major, he shared a sweet memory of when he was younger at Prospect Park, a park by his childhood house in Downtown Brooklyn. There, he would take a can of dried mustard powder, mix it with water, and pour it down wormholes near the big lake. 

“And then we’d use the worms to go catch fish in the lake. And I look back on it and this like-gosh-what a twisted little kid I was, ruining these worms’ days, torturing these fish. But, for me, it was like one of the first times I got to actually get my hands dirty, and see organisms up close,” Abe says energetically.

Continuing with the questions on the college path, I ask, “Where did you go for your Master’s and Ph.D.?” 

Abe started his Master’s in 2008, and “give or take a year” started his Ph.D. in 2011 consecutively at UC Santa Cruz, meaning he’d been in school for about 8-9 years. When finding out where he wanted to start his graduate journey, he expressed “I knew I wanted to do something around preventing extinctions, something with birds, and maybe something on islands because islands are disproportionately places where lots of birds are threatened and have gone extinct.”  

From there he stumbled upon a lab at UC Santa Cruz doing exactly that, “I just emailed them kind of out of the blue, the first time I reached out, they were super excited, we talked, and encouraged me to apply, and then I didn’t get in. I was pretty heartbroken about the whole thing, but the professor I talked to about it called me back the next year, saying that this year might be a better fit. So then I came out to Santa Cruz to get a Master’s degree, and I really fell in love with research, and the stuff out here, and everything California had to offer, so I stayed for a Ph.D., and now I’m a professor here.”

Things really do work out in the end, even through hardships, Abe Borker found his way to where he is now. As a Marine Biology major myself, hearing other, real people continue their passions in science, and overcoming rejection and other difficulties can be moving –– dreams can still come true and we will make it in the end.

“Were there any moments when you felt this path wasn’t for you then, or even now?” 

“All the time,” he laughs. “There’s been a lot of reasons not to do this that have come up. The field is full of challenges and having the support of other people has really helped me get through it. There’s been points when the pay has been bad, the work has been hard, the colleagues have been frustrating, but I think anytime you’re sort of following a passion. You’re gonna run into obstacles.”

Despite already knowing his job title, and having him as my teacher, I was still confused about his job description, so I went ahead with the next question. What is your role in EEB, and what does that entail?  

“I was hired under the job title of assistant professor of field teaching, which means that I get to focus most of my time on teaching and sort of broader leadership in field teaching at UCSC, and other UCs. I spend about two-thirds of my time thinking about the classes I teach here, and I spend the rest of my time, thinking about more broadly how do we make it easier for professors to teach field classes, and how do we make field classes more effective. I collaborate with other universities across the Bay Area, across the country, even across the world. We’ve identified field courses as a high-impact practice that can not only help people become better biologists but can also close some of the opportunity gaps for historically marginalized populations.”

When asking “What things do you like and dislike about your career?” I learned that Borker loves being able to go outside and learn from his students, while he dislikes that our society is structured around the Monday to Friday –– 9 to 5 idea because that means he ends up working on the weekends. It can be difficult because he has a family and kids, but the weekends are the only time he can get his students out in the field overnight or 10 hours at a time “for those real immersive experiences.” 

What is one or two things you’ve done in your career or outside of it that you are proud of?

“I guess, I’ll choose two things,” Abe exclaims, “One thing I’m really proud of is the research that I was able to be a big part of during my Ph.D. Sea birds are very endangered, there are a lot of tools to save sea birds, but there weren’t a lot of tools to measure the outcomes of those conservation actions. We published a series of papers, me and other collaborators at UCSC and elsewhere. And now, it’s become really commonplace, and that’s exciting to me that the research had a really big impact. We were involved in projects where we discovered the first breeding locations for some of the rarest seabirds in the world. It’s sort of scratched the itch I had when I started graduate school on wanting to prevent extinctions from happening and working with some of the rarest species in the world, and back from the brink.”

At this point in his life, another pride of his is that he was the director for four years of the Doris Duke Conservation Scholar Program, a nationwide fellows program dedicated to diversifying conservation leadership. He was involved with the program for 8 years as a Summer Instructor at first, then as a program director, and now the scholar program is wrapping up. Abe vocalizes he’s “Pretty dang proud of them,” when speaking about his scholars who are now becoming professors and “doing amazing things out in the world.”

Wrapping up the interview, with the great bird whisperer himself, I ask my last question, “Is there anything you want to say to all the future scientists pursuing a career in any biology field?

“There’s so much to say, but I think one thing is that there are a lot of ways in which science as an institution, universities as institutions – we’re built by historical systems, and they go on today, but they don’t have to be the way these things function. There’s sort of this history of patriarchy, white supremacy, settlers, and colonialism that built things like UC Santa Cruz, and modern conception of Western science, but it doesn’t have to be that way. So you’re going to be often reminded in these fields of how they were built and who they were built to serve, but it doesn’t mean it needs to be that way going forward. So I would say to all folks that want to be scientists, you can and you totally belong here.” 

A common theme throughout this interview truly was passion, and Dr. Abe Borker is a great example of that. If you can dream it you really can do it! Let’s continue to save the Earth and the beautiful biodiversity we have here. Thank you Abe for taking the time to speak with me, I had a great time!

Alexandra Valerio