Floyd Shockley:
Hi, my name is Dr. Floyd Shockley. I'm the Collections Manager for the Department of Entomology at the National Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. I'm an entomologist, or a scientist that studies insects, and in particular, I'm interested in beetles, the most diverse animal group on earth. I like the variety of work that I do on any given day and I get to play around in the largest insect collection in the world on a daily basis. What's not to love about that?
My main job at the National Museum of Natural History is to care for our national insect collections. That means, I make sure the 35 million insects in our collection are taken care of and are preserved in such a way that they will always be available for scientists like me, and others, to do research on them. As the collections manager, I'm in charge of all 400,000 species we have in our collection and I have to know their names, how to preserve them and their biology. In other words, how and where they live, and special adaptations for survival.
It's also part of my job to make sure the collection's well organized so scientists today and in the future have access to them. So, I have to be organized, I have to know how specimens of all types need to be preserved, I've got to be good at communicating with my colleagues, and of course I have to study and learn about many different kinds of insects. While there are certainly times when things don't go as predicted while managing the national collection, part of my job is to solve those problems when things don't go as planned. So finding solutions quickly is important for managing a collection the size of ours, because some of our specimens may be the only ones of that species in any collection, anywhere. They may be from a species that's now extinct, or they may be from a place that no longer exists.
These problems can seem minor like a freezer breaking down or leaking pipes, or having parts of the collection become inaccessible due to unforeseen issues like a global pandemic. But it's my job to make sure that all problems that impact our collections are solved quickly, or if they can't be solved quickly that the collections remain safe for however long it takes.
I was not one of those kids who grew up collecting insects in my backyard, but I did grow up on a small farm in rural Missouri, and I spent a lot of time outdoors. So I've always had a fascination with the natural world and was personally drawn to science through school as a way of observing, studying, and asking questions about it. During college and graduate school, I got to explore entomology more and I fell in love with it and I've been studying insects ever since.
I've always seen myself as a scientist, even before I started getting paid to do it. There really isn't one single way to be a scientist. There are lots of ways to do science. Science is more a way of thinking about something you want to know about. Have you ever heard a bird in the backyard, wondered what it was, and then figured it out? Then you've done science. Science is a way of taking things that seem confusing and studying them in a way that helps answer questions. Have you ever looked at a problem your teacher is giving you and devised a strategy to answer that problem? Then you've done science.
Science is more than just a thing that nerdy researchers do. It's the word we use to describe the process you already use to learn about things you don't already know about. Anyone can do science. Absolutely anyone, and that's something we want because there's still so many questions and not enough researchers to answer all of them. So, helping others get involved in science benefits everyone, even if they end up doing something else entirely. Knowing how to think critically, ask questions, and figuring out how to answer them is always going to be useful regardless of what career path a person takes.
