From an “Ecologist Directory” maintained by the ESA Education Office about 2004-2011. Profile circa 2005. As of 2013, Dr. Twombly was director of the National Science Foundation’s Long Term Research in Environmental Biology (LTREB) program. When did you get interested in ecology? Who was most influential in guiding you into ecology?Like many professional ecologists, I spent lots of time outdoors…
Knowledge has power only when it is shared. From an “Ecologist Directory” maintained by the ESA Education Office about 2004-2011. Profile circa 2005. As with many ecologists, Dr. Kimmerer’s training began in the forests of her childhood home. With European and Anishinaabe ancestry, Dr. Kimmerer is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She helped found ESA’s Traditional Ecological Knowledge…
How do you describe your job when you meet people at a party? I work with penguins. Conservation biologist and penguin researcher Dr. Dee Boersma holds the Wadsworth Endowed Chair in Conservation Science and Professor of Biology at the University of Washington. She directs the Center for Penguins as Ocean Sentinels and is Co-Chair of the International Union for the…
Lois Hattery Tiffany, March 8, 1924–September 6, 2009 This post is part of a series for Women’s History Month, March 2016. See all related posts. In the later years of her long and celebrated career at Iowa State University, popular field classes (mushroom walks and prairie wildflower trips) gave Dr. Lois Tiffany the title “Mushroom Lady,” by which she is…
Ada Hayden August 14, 1884–August 12, 1950 Hayden is primarily associated with prairie preservation in Iowa. Within a year of earning her Ph.D., her research on the ecology of prairie plants in central Iowa was published in the American Journal of Botany (1919) and the Proceedings of the Iowa Academy of Science (1919). She issued a tentative call for prairie…
This post is part of a series for Women’s History Month, March 2016. See all related posts. In August 1988, Dr. Jean Harmon Langenheim spoke to ESA members as the Society’s past president. Her speech, The Path and Progress of American Women Ecologists, was published in the ESA Bulletin the following December. In the introduction, she wrote: “For my address…
This post is part of a series for Women’s History Month, March 2016. See all related posts. Thirty years ago, Dr. Jean Langenheim initiated a project on “women ecologists” by sending letters to dozens of women who were practicing ecology, most of whom were in the United States. From her position as ESA’s past president, she asked each of them…
March will, once again, be Women’s History Month here in the U.S.* We’ll be focusing on the many women who now work, and have worked, in ecological sciences. We would love to have your help! We’ll be posting bios of women whose contributions are significant but who may, personally, be little known outside the field of ecology, as well as…