We hope you enjoy this series where we meet and get to know employees from across campus. Would you like to be featured? Contact us at campusnews@csufresno.edu.

Name: Ulrike Muller
Title: Professor
Department: Biology
Academic Degree(s): Ph.D. in Marine Biology, Groningen University, Netherlands

How long have you worked at Fresno State and which offices have you worked in?
I started in 2007 as an assistant professor.

Are you a Valley native? If not, what brought you to the area and to Fresno State?
I moved to the U.S. for my position here. Fresno was my eighth international move actually, and also my eighth move across a major body of water. It is also the longest I have lived in one place since moving out from my home village in the border region of Germany, France, and Luxembourg. And in four years it will be the longest I have lived in one place.

Are you a Bulldog family with generations of Bulldog graduates or current students?
No, I am a first-gen immigrant to Fresno and have no children.

Do you have a campus mentor or someone who has helped you in your career?
When I first arrived here, I was so grateful to my fellow incoming professor Joy Goto for taking me under her wing. Recently, the person I turn most to on this campus for mentoring is William Hardaway. And then there are Brain Tsukimura, Fred and Mark Schreiber, and Lindasue Garner in my department, who are putting up with me spending way too much time in their office. And of course there is my partner in many past projects to improve student success, Eric Person in chemistry. And my pre-faculty-meeting lunch buddies Ali, Rory, David and Alija, whose friendship keeps me grounded. As you can see, there are so many people on this campus who I am grateful to for their fellowship and mentorship, so I stop here before this becomes an even longer laundry list. I appreciate how this campus attracts so many wonderful people.

Tell us about your department and what people may not know about it.
I am very proud of the groundwork laid by my former colleague Madhu Katti, who started two science outreach initiatives while working on campus, and both of which I inherited and am continuing. In 2007, we started Central Valley Café Scientifique, and a few years later Madhu started a radio show airing on our local station KFCF, called "Science a Candle in the Dark," which I took over in 2016 when Madhu left Fresno. Café Sci is still in COVID-19 hibernation, but the radio show is going strong, thanks to my co-hosts and fellow biologists Alija Mujic and Rory Telemeco. So our department is very active in science outreach. Of course, so are other departments in the College of Science and Math (shout-out to Donny Williams and Ray Hall from physics, Beth Weinman and Ben Anderson from EES).

What is your most notable accomplishment in your field, and why was it important?
My claim to scholarly fame is my research on how fish swim. In 1997, I was the first researcher to get at the mechanisms that fish use to swim. I did so by using a brand-new technique that I co-developed and allowed us to see how the water moved around swimmers. In 2015, we started applying this technique to a new set of organisms, carnivorous plants, specifically the underwater traps of bladderworts. And we discovered that those plants are the fastest predators, faster than any animal predator in that these traps catch their prey within one millisecond, literally 300 times faster than the blink of an eye. My research is what’s called basic science, yet my fish work has been foundational for my discipline and has spawned many follow-up projects, including applications such as building better fish ladders. Time will tell about our bladderwort work.

What are you most passionate about in your field and why?
Since joining this campus, I have begun to focus more on equity issues in academia and STEM fields (science, math and engineering). I am currently serving as editor-in-chief of a top 10 journal in my discipline. I am drawing on my own experience as an English-Additional-Language scholar to try to improve equity in scholarly publishing. Yet, mainly I am using what I have learned here through countless professional development opportunities. The most recent of which is the "Equity-Minded Pedagogy" community of practice, which just graduated its first cohort of faculty and recruiting the next cohort.

What is a memorable moment you had at your job?
Oh my, when I hear this question, my brain first goes to my most embarrassing moments rather than the good memories. Well, my favorite story happened during the first President’s Leadership Academy, which I was lucky to be a part of. We were working in pairs, and our prompt was to share a personal success. We were given an example, which was the typical "I overcame adversity and gained recognition for my achievements" story. We shared in pairs, and then shared out what each of us had shared. Turns out that the vast majority if not all of us had chosen a moment when we had been foundational to the success of someone else. I was so proud of all of us for showing true servant-leadership spirit.

What is a memorable moment you had in class?
I had a student in my class who had served as an engineer on a Navy vessel during the second Iraq war. I teach a class that uses a lot of engineering concepts (to explain how and why bones break, for example), and she shared that she finds my class in fact easier rather than harder because of that. I immediately recruited her into my research team because my research has a strong engineering component (we build robotic models of organisms). When we met, she was ready to drop out and joining my lab changed her mind. She is now a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley and we are talking a lot about how to best get her back here to Fresno as a faculty.

What is your teaching style?
My colleague, Rory Telemeco, calls my style chaotic good, my students might sometimes feel that it drifts more into chaotic neutral. As a student I had extreme test anxiety and would either ace a test or fail. So now all my classes have assignments that require students to do work that is relevant to or mirrors professional practices (conducting research, writing proposals, presenting at symposia, host a debate, etc.), and my exams are more akin to reflections on the projects that we complete in class and I focus on learning content through skill building and using professional practices. I am so grateful to my students for the creative projects that they think up, and all the hard work they put into them. This way, every semester is a new surprise.

What is your favorite quote or saying?
It is Audre Lorde’s "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," from "Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches" (1984).

What is the most interesting or unusual job you've ever had?
Other than my job at Fresno, my best paid job was as a factory worker at Mercedes Benz, cleaning the windows and polishing the chrome parts (yep, they still had chrome parts back then) in six minutes per car.

What do you like to do for fun in your spare time?
My spouse and I have a decent size vegetable garden and we are growing most of the produce we are eating. I love experimenting with new varieties. This year we grew eight varieties of pepper plants, six varieties of tomatoes, two different watermelons, two different eggplants and so much more. My favorite plant is okra for their fruit and their beautiful flowers. We live in the Sierra foothills, so it is a constant battle with the ground squirrels, deer and birds.