2010
Bruce Menge
Professor
Oregon State University
Bruce Menge has spent over four decades developing a rich understanding of the processes that drive the dynamics of natural communities. Starting with his Ph.D. work at the University of Washington in the late 1960s, Bruce has used rocky intertidal marine communities as a model system. His work has taken him from the Washington coast, to the shores of New England, to the Oregon coast which has been his main focus since his arrival at Oregon State University in 1976. But his work has not been limited to the shores of North America: he has also done research in Panama, New Zealand, and Chile. He combines the keen skills of a naturalist with the focused attention of an experimental ecologist, while never losing track of the big conceptual questions that motivate community ecology. Bruce applied interdisciplinary and comparative approaches across scales of biological organization long before this was the norm, helping shape major advances in our understanding of marine ecosystems. He has mentored a small legion of graduate students (>38!) who universally applaud Bruce’s accessibility, supportiveness, and insatiable enthusiasm for hands-on, experimental field ecology. In addition to his professional success, he and his partner Dr. Jane Lubchenco pioneered job-sharing for a period of time, actively modeling one pathway to successfully balancing academic and personal life goals.
2009
Greg Cailliet
Professor Emeritus
Moss Landing Marine Laboratories & California State University, Fresno
Program Director, Pacific Shark Research Center
cailliet@mlml.calstate.edu
For more than four decades, since his graduate work at UCSB in the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, Greg has studied the ecology of marine fishes. He joined the faculty at MLML and CSU Fresno in 1972 and has been there ever since. He has been primarily interested in deep-sea fishes and their ecology but also bay, estuarine and chondrichthyan fishes. He has spent considerable time in the field collecting fishes and data on their habitats, using ships, nets, and submersibles. Back in the lab, his interests have centered on the life histories (i.e. feeding habits, age and growth, reproduction, and demography) of these fishes. He and his graduate students have pioneered age determination, verification, and validation techniques in fishes using the growth zones in their calcified structures, along with their radio-isotopic characteristics. He considers teaching and mentoring to be the most important part of his career, having taught Marine Ichthyology, Population Biology, Ecology, Fisheries, and various graduate seminars. He has served as the major advisor for more than 120 M.S. students, and has been on the committees of countless other M.S. and Ph.D. students. Greg has been very active both in WSN and the American Elasmobranch Society over his career. He feels that these two organizations contributed the most to the success of his students. And, he feels that his students and colleagues are the reason for his success and productivity.
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2008
John and Vicki Pearse
Professor Emeritus of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Research Associate of the Institute of Marine Sciences
University of California, Santa Cruz
pearse@biology.ucsc.edu
vpearse@ucsc.edu
WSN meetings, starting >40 years ago, initiated John & Vicki into a lifetime of active participation in biological societies, communities in which both were destined to become leaders (John, President of WSN, California Academy of Sciences, International Society of Invertebrate Reproduction, Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology; Vicki, President of the American Microscopical Society.) They are passionate about marine invertebrates and have shared this enthusiasm at every opportunity with a multitude of students and other colleagues, through their teaching, editing (e.g, the 7-volume treatise Reproduction of Marine Invertebrates, with Arthur Giese; the journal Invertebrate Biology by Vicki), textbooks (Animals Without Backbones and Living Invertebrates, with Vicki’s parents, Ralph and Mildred Buchsbaum), and other writings. John’s research has spanned reproductive biology, the rocky intertidal, and kelp forest ecology. His favorite animals are echinoderms; Vicki’s are cnidarians and placozoans. The two have worked and published on these and other organisms, both separately and as a team, mostly on the California coast but ranging willingly from tropical to antarctic waters. They haven’t stopped yet.
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2007
Paul Dayton
Professor of Oceanography
Integrative Oceanography Division, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
University of California, San Diego
pdayton@ucsd.edu
As a biological oceanographer, Paul Dayton researches coastal and estuarine habitats, including seafloor (“benthic”) and kelp communities, as well as global fisheries. He has conducted investigations in several parts of the world, including spending 50 months in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica, performing research during scuba dives under the ice. The scientific papers resulting from these research projects are largely believed to have set the standard for Antarctic undersea ecology. He has studied nearshore benthic communities in many parts of the world and is presently working on California kelp communities and Antarctic benthic communities. Dayton’s studies also include the impacts of overfishing on marine ecosystems. Besides his own students, the part of his career that gives him the most satisfaction is his contribution to the UC Natural Reserve System.
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2006
Robert (Bob) Paine
Professor of Zoology, Emeritus
University of Washington
painert@u.washington.edu
Except for his dissertation research and a postdoc at Scripps
Institution (La Jolla), Robert Paine's academic career has been spent at the
University of Washington. Persistent themes of his research are the central role of
natural history, predation and the related top-down influences (with
the necessity of experimental manipulation if one wants to
understand ecological processes). Food web structure and the roles of
disturbance have been a common focus. Most of Robert's
research has been done on exposed, rocky intertidal shores on the
outer coast of Washington State, especially Tatoosh Island. His 34 PhD
students remain sources of friendship, inspiration and continuing
pride. Bob has gone the extra mile in training a lot of students who have become leaders in the field of Natural History.
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2005
Joseph (Joe) Connell
Professor of Zoology, Emeritus
Ecology, Evolution & Marine Biology
University of California, Santa Barbara
connell@lifesci.lscf.ucsb.edu
How appropriate it was for the WSN to give Joseph Connell the first award because of the sweeping fundamental ecological insights that Joe has pulled from nature in such very different ecosystems. He truly is one of the all time synthetic geniuses in the field of natural history and almost all of his fundamental work came from his appreciation of natural history. Joe joined the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) faculty in 1956, specialized in the study of the ecology of tropical rain forests and coral reefs. He was a research professor of ecology, evolution, and marine biology. Now Emeritus, Joe is interested in long-term studies in ecology with specialties in population biology, community ecology, marine ecology, terrestrial ecology and theoretical ecology.
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