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

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. Current efforts focus on Volume 5, to cover the freshwater gastropod fauna of The Ohio, Tennessee, and Cumberland drainage systems.  Our field surveys are advancing westward.