Barber, Paul
Paul Barber
Paul H. Barber is an evolutionary and conservation geneticist. In his career, Dr. Barber has studied frogs, oceanography, genomics, and marine biodiversity, seeking to improve the conservation of marine ecosystems. His work focuses on increasing the diversity and representation of minority students and scientists. Dr. Barber has worked at UCLA since 2008. Dr. Barber has received the Life Science Award for Excellence in Educational Innovation, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, and the UCLA Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award.
“You need to find people that care about your personal success… [If] you know this field is what you want to go into, you need to lay the ground work as soon as possible.” - Paul Barber, 2006.
Barber, P.H., Meyer, C.P. Pluralism explains diversity in the Coral Triangle. In: Mora C (ed) Ecology of Fishes on Coral Reefs: pp. 258-263; Cambridge University Press.
Barber, P.H., Cheng, S.H., Erdmann, M.V. Tengardjaja, K., Ambariyanto. 2011. Evolution and conservation of marine biodiversity in the Coral Triangle: insights from stomatopod Crustacea”” In: Held, C., S. Koenemann & C.D. Schubart (eds), Crustacean Issues 19 Phylogeography and Population Genetics in Crustacea: pp. 129-156. CRC Press
Faurby, S. & P.H. Barber. 2015. Extreme population subdivision despite high colonization ability: Contrasting regional patterns in intertidal tardigrades from the west coast of North America. Journal of Biogeography, 42(6). doi.org/10.1111/jbi.12500.
Marwayana, O, Gold, Z, Meyer, C, Barber, PH. 2022. Environmental DNA in a Global Biodiversity Hotspot: Lessons from Coral Reef Fish Diversity Across the Indonesian Archipelago. Environmental DNA. 4, 222–238. https://doi.org/10.1002/edn3.257
Sembiring, A., Pertiwi, N.P.D., Mahardini, A., Wulandari, R., Cahyani, N.K.D., Anggoro, A., Ulfa, M., Madduppa, H., Carpenter, KE, Barber, P.H., Mahardika, G.N. (in press) DNA Barcoding reveals targeted fisheries for endangered sharks in Indonesia. Journal of Fisheries Research.
Paul Barber grew up in Tucson, Arizona, which leads many people find it odd that he devotes his career to studying marine organisms. “People think it’s weird that I come from there,” Dr. Barber says. “[But] if you grow up in the desert, you become fixated on water. So my physical environment had a big effect” (2006). He spent much time catching wildlife, hiking in the mountains near his childhood home, and watching Wild Kingdom and Jacques Cousteau on TV. “I’ve always had lots of opportunities to do a variety of fieldwork-type things, largely from a desire to do fun stuff outside,” Dr. Barber says. “Those fieldwork experiences put me on a path where I kept looking for opportunities to do those sorts of things, and that’s how I ended up where I am today.”
Dr. Barber double majored in music and biology at the University of Arizona. During summers, he conducted spotted owl surveys as a southwestern field biologist. “I spent all my time hiking around mountains looking for spotted owls—essentially, I was paid to go backpacking,” he says. “I thought that was cool.” Early in college, Dr. Barber thought he would pursue music performance, but finding he had more biology credits as a senior, he decided to follow a scientific path instead.
After graduating from college in 1991, Barber began a doctoral program in integrative biology at the University of California-Berkeley. While finishing his Ph.D., he also taught field courses for Columbia University out of the biosphere research center in Tucson from in 1997 and 1998. Dr. Barber enjoyed the experience, explaining, “It was a six-week-long field course focused on a variety of aspects of environmental sciences. I felt like the course taught itself. It’s not as difficult to get someone excited about cool things seen in the field as it is to get them excited about concepts in a book. You get to use the environment around you as a classroom, and it sticks with students a lot more.”
Following a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, Barber took a position as an assistant professor at Boston University. Dr. Barber’s researched the dispersal of frogs among the sky islands of the desert southwest while completing his Ph.D. research at UC Berkeley. After earning his degree in integrative biology in 1998, he was a National Science Foundation (NSF) postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University from 1999 to 2002. There, he studied marine ecosystems of the Coral Triangle.
In 2002, Dr. Barber became an assistant professor at Boston University in the Marine Program. He taught there for six years before moving to UCLA in 2008 to work as an Associate Professor in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department. Dr. Barber leads the Barber Lab. His lab researches evolutionary and ecological topics in marine environments with integrated fieldwork and genetic tools. The lab also works to make STEM more inclusive and accessible. Starting in 2004, Dr. Barber began directing The Diversity Project at UCLA. The Diversity Project is a summer research program that increases diversity in marine sciences.
In 2009, Dr. Barber began directing the Program for Excellent in Education and Research in the Sciences (PEERS). PEERS seeks to increase the retention of minority students studying science and STEM fields at UCLA.
Since 2011, Dr. Barber has been a member of the board of trustees for the Alice C. Tyler Perpetual Trust. From 2014 to 2015, Dr. Barber was the Vice Chair for Education in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.
Since 2017, Dr. Barber has been an Equity Advisor for UCLA’s Division of Life Sciences. He has also been a professor at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability since 2014. In 2013, Dr. Barber became a full professor at UCLA in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology department.
Starting in 2019, Dr. Barber has worked with UCLA’s Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Health Disparities and the Environment Program. He is the director of the program that provides opportunities and connections for minority students in their second year of their life sciences degrees to investigate health disparities.
Dr. Barber has also struggled through the occasional low points in his career. He cites the process of applying for post-doc and faculty positions as the single most challenging period he has experienced so far. “It’s an incredibly competitive endeavor,” he says. “There are so many [people] getting Ph.D.’s every year than can be absorbed by the academic job market. Each job available in your field may have 400 people applying, and you get rejected a lot. I got a thick skin after a while.” Dr. Barber says he occasionally thought about quitting during that time. However, he did eventually get a post-doc position at Harvard. “I don’t know where I’d be if everyone rejected me that year,” he says. “What kept me [going] was someone saying yes.” That turned out to be a good decision—in 2005, Dr. Barber was recognized as one of the best young scientists in the country when he received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.
In 2015, Dr. Barber was honored for his work advancing diversity within STEM fields by the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) at its national conference. The accolades and recognition of Dr. Barber’s work have continued. In 2017, Dr. Barber received a distinguished alumni award, the University of Arizona Spriti of Inquiry Award. In 2019, he received the UCLA Gold Shield Prize, which is the highest faculty honor at UCLA. In 2020, he was nominated to the California Academy of Sciences as a fellow. In 2021, Dr. Barber won Naturalist of the Year from the Western Society of Naturalists.
Dr. Barber found mentors who guided and supported his decisions at every career stage. The earliest was a faculty member and Fisheries Biologist at the University of Arizona, whom Dr. Barber met while in high school. He remained his mentor through college, where he taught Dr. Barber about fisheries science, despite Arizona not having a program in the subject. As an undergraduate, Dr. Barber conducted research for two professors, Dr. Marilyn Houck and Dr. Richard Strauss. “I think they have a lot to do with the fact that I pursued graduate school,” Dr. Barber says. “They had a lot to do with where I went to graduate school as well. They were really important.” His postdoctoral advisor, Steve Palumbi, also helped him translate his skills from terrestrial to marine biology and influenced how he thought about working in marine environments.
Perhaps Dr. Barber’s most essential and influential mentor was his friend Dr. Tyrone Hayes, a professor at UC Berkeley. Dr. Hayes and Dr. Barber were initially students together, but Dr. Hayes finished his Ph.D. in four years and was hired as an assistant professor the following year. When Dr. Barber’s initial advisor left for another school, he completed his Ph.D. in Hayes’s lab. “We were good friends before and after he [Hayes] got the job, and he shared with me his experiences as a junior faculty member, experiences that students don’t typically know about,” Dr. Barber explains (2006). “He taught me that nothing as a student prepares you for a job as a faculty member…he was also influential in teaching me how to develop networking skills and build relations with funding agencies.” Barber admired Hayes’s commitment to mentoring other students. This commitment inspired Barber to mentor other students in the future. He remembers that Hayes’s lab was always “packed with undergrads that he worked with because it’s important to him that he build those relationships with his students early.” Overall, Barber says of Hayes: “I can’t say enough about the importance of his role. The fact that he was essentially a few years ahead of me and constantly sharing the knowledge that he was developing at the time; that was really helpful to me. It was invaluable” (2006).
As a professor, Dr. Barber takes mentoring very seriously. In addition to mentoring the undergraduates and graduate students in his lab, he has developed a program called The Diversity Project, which aims to increase the number of underrepresented minority students in the marine sciences. He takes several students to Indonesia every summer to do fieldwork, where they employ field and laboratory techniques to understand the origins of marine biodiversity in Indonesia. “We’re not just working with students in the field and in lab,” Dr. Barber explains. “We’re really trying to help them develop an appreciation for the sciences that are involved.” The program also aims to help students develop practical skills, like identifying professional goals, selecting and applying to graduate schools, and career planning. “This way, when the time comes, and the students are applying, they’ll be competitive and actually get into the lab and the program they want to,” Dr. Barber says. Most of the alums of The Diversity Project go on to graduate school. 2014 marked a major milestone as three of The Diversity Project alums completed their PhDs. Dr. Barber looks forward to these young researchers’ contributions to their scientific fields and mentoring the next generation.
Dr. Barber says the best thing minorities looking to pursue careers in the environmental field can do is to find mentors; the earlier, the better. “You need to find people that care about your personal success because very often undergraduates don’t think about these things until it’s time to apply to graduate school, and then it’s too late,” he advises. “If you know this is the field you want to go into, you need to lay the groundwork as soon as possible” (2006).
Paul Barber, Ph.D. HHMI: Howard Hughes Medical Institute. https://www.hhmi.org/scientists/paul-barber Barber Lab. N.d. https://barberlab.eeb.ucla.edu/
Interview conducted by Multicultural Environmental Leadership Development Initiative staff. 2016. University of Michigan – School of Natural Resources and Environment. Ann Arbor, MI.
Paul Henry Barber. Curriculum vitae. https://barberlab.eeb.ucla.edu/curriculum-vitae/
Taylor, Dorceta (Ed.). 2006. The Paths We Thread: Profiles of the Careers of Minority Environmental Professionals: II. Minority Environmental Leadership Development Initiative, University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment.