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By Helen Fosgate
hfosgate@smokey.forestry.uga.edu
 Ron Hendrick reaches behind the seat to retrieve the long plastic tube he brought as a prop for his portrait.
“What’s that thing?” the photographer asks, walking over for a closer look.
“Mini-rhizotron tube,” Hendrick answers, holding it out. “It’s how we study roots underground.”
“Ah, so you’re a root voyeur,” says the photographer, grinning.
“Exactly,” says Hendrick, turning to the writer. “And be sure to include that in the story, okay?”
Hendrick, a forest ecologist in UGA’s Warnell School of Forest Resources, observes roots underground. He pioneered the use of tiny video cameras buried inside long clear tubes called mini-rhizotrons to study the birth, growth and death of roots without disturbing them. He also developed an analytical framework and new computer software, called Roots, to capture and interpret the data.
His innovations helped to reinvigorate the field of root research and are now being used in labs and research programs worldwide. In March, Gamma Sigma Delta, the honor society of science, presented him with their Junior Faculty Award for outstanding research.
Hendrick doesn’t fit the stereotype of hand-wringing ecologist. “It’s true, ecologists tend to be worriers,” he says, “but I try to be an optimist. I also try not to be a political advocate, especially in my classes.”
Above all, Hendrick strives to maintain objectivity in his work, a code he says fosters cooperation and trust with colleagues in other disciplines. He especially enjoys working in large, investigative groups. “It’s challenging, but effective,” he says. “It’s the science, not the opinions, that drive the work.”
He considers himself fortunate to work in a university where there are no barriers to collaboration. His graduate students come from across campus, mostly from botany, ecology and
biology. And he works with others from across the country through his work with the Coweta Long-Term Ecological Research Site, headquartered in Otto, N.C.
“It’s one of the things I like about the way UGA is organized,” he says. “We have a disciplinary home and a philosophical home base, but nothing to inhibit us from working with faculty or graduate students in other areas.”
Hendrick grew up in Jackson, Mich., a working-class town tied to the auto industry and home of the state penitentiary.
“It was a big deal getting a new grocery store in the Rust Belt,” remembers Hendrick, whose father was a tool and die maker. He graduated from Jackson’s Northwest High School in 1981, then took a year off to contemplate his future. He looks back on that year as an important time in which he considered many possibilities, including the military. “My pen was poised on the dotted line at one point,” he says. “But I didn’t sign.”
He opted for college and enrolled at Michigan State University, though he says he’d hardly been a stellar student. That he went to college at all was a surprise, even to him. “The words ‘future college professor’ would not have appeared under my name in the high school yearbook,” he admits.
Once there though, Hendrick was attracted by the opportunity to pursue many interests. He soon began to consider academia as a career possibility, and after earning a bachelor’s degree in forestry in 1986, he entered graduate school as a doctoral candidate in forest ecology.
He met his future wife, Michelle, at Michigan State, where she was studying engineering as an undergraduate. Today she is a materials engineer with a small, high-tech company in Atlanta.
After completing his doctorate, Hendrick moved to Fairbanks, Alaska, for a year, where he used a National Science Foundation fellowship to study root physiology at the Institute of Arctic Biology.
In addition to carrying on his research, Hendrick teaches an undergraduate course in silviculture and a graduate course in forest ecology. He also directs two doctoral and two master’s degree students and serves on 16 graduate student committees. New to his research are molecular and biochemical techniques that will allow his lab to identify certain soil organisms and link them to specific root functions.
“If we can determine what organisms are there and how they behave and react, we’ll be one step closer to understanding the larger role of underground processes,” he says.
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