Assistant Professor of Biology Christopher Heckel has made a profession out of stopping to smell the tulips. Heckel has taught at Hillsdale College for five years, but his love for biology started as a kid. 

“I’ve always been in love with biology,” Heckel said. “When I was in fourth grade we were learning about the parts of the flower, and I just thought that was the neatest thing. I dissected so many flowers after learning how to do it.”

Heckel said his favorite flower, aesthetically, is the tulip, but second choice is Arisaema triphyllum, a flower commonly known as Jack-in-the-pulpit. His love of flowers followed him to graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh, where he examined the impact of deer on the unpalatable forest herb in his research. 

“From a science perspective, my still and current favorite flower is the flower from my dissertation that I worked on, which is Jack-in-the-Pulpit,” Heckel said. “It’s a woodland herb and it has deceptive pollination syndrome, so it actually traps bugs to do its pollination.”

Among the other unique features of the flower, Heckel said that every year it can change its gender from male to female, female to male, or from a gender to no gender at all. 

“It’s a way for the flower to focus its efforts on being one sex or the other to maximize what it can do with its resources,” Heckel said. “That improves its competition for reproduction.”

Within the context of his dissertation, Heckel said he was studying the flower’s impact on deer as an unpalatable forest herb.

“It’s typically not consumed because it has highly irritating crystals in its tissue,” Heckel said. “If you were to chew on one of these plants your mouth would start to burn and you wouldn’t want to eat much more.” 

Some students, such as sophomore and biology major Sam Wallace, have a particular appreciation of Heckel’s interest in plants. 

“I really like him because he’s a botany guy and we have similar interests,” Wallace said. “He definitely knows what he’s doing.”

Junior Bree Cocelli is one of Heckel’s advisees and has taken a few of Heckel’s classes. 

“His passion for plants, and his extensive knowledge of all things plant-related is infectious and makes all of his students—but  especially his advisees for research— want to learn more and to be better scientists. My biggest advice to any Hillsdale student, even if they want to stay as far away from strosacker as possible, is to take a class with Dr. Heckel. You won’t regret it!”

Before finishing his dissertation, Heckel received a bachelor’s degree in biology from Hillsdale College in 1999, and a master’s degree in biology from Georgia Southern University in 2004.

One of Heckel’s favorite stories from graduate school concerns the time he went hunting for a flower in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. 

“In our doctoral program, my adviser worked on a particular genus of plants and one of the species lived in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan,” Heckel said. “She was looking for someone in the lab to go collect these flowers for her.” 

Volunteering to go search for these flowers, Heckel arrived in March, with snow still on the ground and a small chance of finding these tiny flowers. 

After wandering around the forest, following the directions of an amateur botanist, Heckel said he only found the flowers after giving up. 

“I sat down on this rock outcropping to figure out what my next plan of action was going to be, and I looked down at my feet and amongst these native cacti I found the flower I was looking for.” 

Heckel’s home wasn’t in the Upper Peninsula or Georgia, though. In fact, he’s a self-described “original townie.” 

“I grew up in Hillsdale County,” Heckel said. “My wife also grew up in the area, and when we started a family we wanted to be close to family.” 

After moving back to Hillsdale in 2000, Heckel taught at Hillsdale Academy as a high school science instructor before the college offered him a job in the biology department as a botanist. 

“When the previous botanist left for another position, that created an opening for me,” Heckel said. “I was lucky enough to get the job.” 

Heckel said his current research in his lab focuses on three main areas: the population biology of forest herbs, effect of regenerative agriculture on soil health, and the dendrochronology of the college’s campus hardwood trees. 

“My botany classes and independent researchers have been collecting and analyzing tree cores, (which is a way to count tree rings without cutting the tree down) to develop a master chronology for the local hardwood tree population which can be further used to explore how climate change has influenced the growth of local tree,” Heckel said. “The oldest tree we have found is 175 years old.”

When he’s not on campus, Heckel is at his historic 3.5-acre farm between Reading and Hillsdale with his wife, Pam, and their four children: Magnus, Oliver, Effie, and Dash. Branching out from his floral expertise, Heckel and his family maintain the land, and raise chickens and ducks whose eggs he occasionally sells to his colleagues.