Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | J | Journal of the Tennessee Academy of Science

President of the Tennessee Academy of Science for 2004.

Article Excerpt
Like most who have come before me as President of the Tennessee Academy of Science, I am pleased to help carry on the tradition of leadership and service for which the Academy has been know for close to a century, 92 years to be exact. My path to this position started, I suppose, in the forest and creeks behind my boyhood home where I would wander during all seasons, reveling in the minutia of nature. Inside, the black and white television programs of Jacque Cousteau eagerly anticipating my own undersea adventures enchanted me. As a student at Brown University in the early 1970s, I was one of the first there to earn an interdisciplinary degree in Aquatic Sciences; a degree I hoped would lead me closer to Jacque. My interest in all things aquatic grew more intense as a summer intern and later as an entry-level Marine Ecologist at the Smithsonian Institution's Chesapeake Bay Center for Environmental Studies, jobs made possible by a chance meeting with David Challinor, then the Smithsonian's Undersecretary for Science and a kindly soul, who must have been impressed by my zeal for science because I had little else to offer at that time.

This early experience propelled me to graduate study in marine biology at the University of Miami and later fisheries biology at Oregon State University where I earned MS and PhD degrees between 1975 and 1982. While at Oregon State I worked under the tutelage of Carl Schreck, a fish biologist who serves as my exemplar of a scientist and human being--I have met no finer person, and I owe much to him for any professional success I have had. Together we studied various...