From Boat to Biosphere, a conversation with Arden Berlinger

By Mark Taylor

There was no doubt for Arden Berlinger that environmental issues were going to be a priority when deciding a career path.

“I knew that I wanted to do something related to environmental and sustainability research,” she says. “When I was an undergrad I was trying to figure out how I could have the biggest environmental impact, and agriculture stood out to me as an issue where you get a lot of environmental ‘bang for the buck’. If you can make agriculture better you can also target problems in energy, in land use, in pollution problems, and in humans.”

Clearly, Berlinger’s intentions were shaped early on, and it stemmed from her upbringing.

Spending time growing up on a farm outside Philadelphia, it meant that the outdoors was a home from home, and it nurtured a strong attachment to nature. The concern about the issues posed by climate change centred the motivation, aided by the irritation when people dismissed the global issue as a myth.

“I feel it is so foundational that nothing else matters to me in quite the same way,” says Berlinger. “All the human elements of society are, to me, ultimately nature based. I think without a healthy planet, all the other challenges we as humans face become superfluous.”

That undergraduate degree was in environmental biology and history, and it created a pathway to the University of Cambridge.

The Pembroke College student’s PhD is in Plant Sciences, under the supervision of Professor John Carr, and focuses on agricultural disease and how it spreads.

“I’m studying Cucumber Mosaic Virus which infects a wide range of plants, especially vegetables, and is transmitted in a very interesting way by aphid vectors,” explains Berlinger. “Basically, when a plant is infected with this virus, the plant smells really nice but tastes really bad. It draws in the insects because it smells great, the insects start feeding off the plant and they think it tastes terrible, but by that point they have already contracted the virus in their saliva. They move onto an uninfected plant and spread it to a new host. In this way the virus has evolved in such a way as to manipulate a host plant to its own advantage. I look at one protein in particular that is responsible for creating a lot of those effects in the smell and taste of infected plants.”

Berlinger is now in the third year of her PhD, and her second year of trialling with CUBC.

She first picked up an oar at high school, thriving in the team nature of the sport, believing it is the “purist teamwork that you can get”. Even though she had drifted towards running during her undergraduate degree, after rowing again with Pembroke, Berlinger decided to trial with the CUBC lightweight squad last year and earned a place in the first boat as they beat Oxford by five lengths.

“I think the Club is excellent,” she says. “I feel like I have learned so many complementary life lessons to add to my studies that I really couldn’t get from anything else.

“I think the culture here is really strong. The coaches are flexible around things. They understand that you are a student first and that this complements that in a big way, but even having it morning and night, it just makes it feel very family-like to me.

“You see everyone in the morning, you go to work and then come back to Goldie and see everyone again at night, and I really like that.”

Whatever Berlinger’s future path holds, in an immediate sense it is heading towards facing Oxford on the Tideway on April 12, when that family feeling will come to the fore.