Curriculum
Vitae
With pdf downloads of papers! ResearchGate
FWGNA Publications The
Ecology of Freshwater Molluscs
Cambridge University Press (2000)
Available in paperback! Videos
(YouTube) Profile,html [pdf] Charleston Post & Courier (2013) Presentations
at Meetings
Grad
Students (1988-2016)
Undergrads (1988-2012)
Darwin Week (2001-16)
Woodrow
Wilson Documents MSCGP
FWGNA
Project
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My research interests are broadly
narrow – ranging
across all aspects of genetics, ecology, and evolutionary biology,
focusing exclusively on the Phylum Mollusca. My undergraduate
training
at
Virginia Tech was primarily ecological or ecosystems
oriented, with research emphasis on the freshwater mollusk fauna of
the upper New
River in Va/NC and summer experiences with the TVA in East
Tennessee. In
graduate school I split my time between the Departments of Malacology
and Limnology at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, and
the University of Pennsylvania. My (1982) PhD dissertation
at Penn focused on natural selection, gene flow restriction, and
genetic divergence among populations of the freshwater
gastropod Goniobasis
(now Pleurocera)
proxima
in the southern
Appalachians. After a year as an AAAS Fellow on Capitol Hill
(working on the Clean Water Act) and a year as a sabbatical replacement
at Rutgers University (teaching Invertebrate Zoology and
Genetics), I
accepted a tenure-track position at the College of
Charleston, where I taught genetics and
evolution for 33 years, until being banned from campus for a
Woodrow Wilson quote in 2016. For more about the Woodrow Wilson
controversy, see Inside Higher Ed 8Aug16.
I became very much involved with hard
clam (Mercenaria)
aquaculture genetics in the mid-1980s through the 1990s,
branching into population genetic research with a variety of intertidal
marine gastropods and bivalves. But I never let go
of my
first love, which has always been the freshwater fauna. By
the
mid-1990s most of my research effort was directed toward the
genetics and reproductive biology of the freshwater pulmonate
gastropod, Physa, including
studies of sex allocation, mating behavior, and speciation.
My single-author book, "The Ecology of Freshwater Molluscs" was
published by Cambridge University Press in 2000.
The
Freshwater
Gastropods of North America Project
was born in the summer
of 1998 at the World Congress of Malacology in Washington, DC.
It
has developed into a long-term, collaborative effort to survey
and monograph the
entire
freshwater gastropod fauna of the continental United States and Canada.
In 25 years the FWGNA Project has covered all or part of 17
southern, eastern and midwestern states. Check out the FWGNA web resource here.
Our first four hardcopy volumes, covering
Atlantic drainages from Georgia to the New York line, were
published in early 2019, with three additional volumes covering
the Ohio, Cumberland, and Tennessee River Systems following in late
2023. See the FWGNA publications page here. Current efforts are extending both south into Florida, and westward through Missouri into the Great Plains.
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