Rate My Professor David Baum

David A. Baum is a Professor of Botany in the Department of Botany at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Discovery Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. He received his B.A. (Honors) in Botany from St. Catherine's College, University of Oxford, in 1985, and his Ph.D. in Evolutionary and Population Biology from Washington University in St. Louis in 1991. After postdoctoral fellowships at UW-Madison from 1991 to 1994, he served as Assistant Professor (1994-1998) and Associate Professor (1998-2001) in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, where he was awarded tenure in 2000. Returning to UW-Madison in 2001, he became Associate Professor and was promoted to full Professor in 2004. Baum has chaired the Department of Botany on multiple occasions (2008-2012, 2015-2017, 2021-) and directed the J. F. Crow Institute for the Study of Evolution from 2010 to 2013. He also served as Interim Associate Director for Students at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery from 2012 to 2014.

Baum's academic interests encompass plant phylogenetics, conceptual issues in evolution and systematics, the origin of life, and eukaryotic cell evolution. His research explores how evolution generates biological diversity through theoretical and empirical approaches, including laboratory experiments on prebiotic chemical systems and artificial ecosystem selection. Key publications include the textbook Tree Thinking: An Introduction to Phylogenetic Biology (2012, with S. D. Smith), co-editorship of The Princeton Guide to Evolution (2013), "An inside-out origin for the eukaryotic cell" (BMC Biology, 2014, with B. Baum), "The origin and early evolution of life in chemical complexity space" (Journal of Theoretical Biology, 2018), and "Chemical Ecosystem Selection on Mineral Surfaces Reveals long-term dynamics consistent with the spontaneous emergence of mutual catalysis" (Life, 2019). Among his honors are the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2007-2008), election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2006), the Kellett Mid-Career Award (2016), and the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award (2015). Baum has contributed to numerous editorial boards, including as Co-Editor of The Plant Cell (2006-2012) and Board of Reviewing Editors for Science (2010-2017), and served as President of the Society of Systematic Biology (2021-2023). He teaches courses such as Introductory Biology and advanced evolutionary biology seminars.