Curriculum Vitae
With pdf downloads of papers!

ResearchGate

FWGNA Publications

FWGNA Blog

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

Mystery Snail 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.  A couple links harkening back to my classroom days at CofC are archived at left.

In Charleston I developed an interest in hard clam (Mercenaria) aquaculture genetics, publishing quite a few papers on the classical and population genetics of marine bivalves in the mid-1980s through the 1990s, branching into the evolutionary genetics of a variety of intertidal gastropods.  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.

I became very much involved in the Creation/Evolution controversies that kicked up in South Carolina around the year 2000, continuing for quite a few years thereafter.  In 2001 I organized the first "Darwin Week in Charleston," coordinating that event for 16 years.  In 2006 I was elected the founding president of the South Carolinians for Science Education, and subsequently spent a great deal of time in Columbia, lobbying and testifying before the State Board of Education, and other agencies and legislative committees, on the state science standards. I was recognized with a "Friend of Darwin" award by the National Center for Science Education in 2009, the bicentennial of the great man's birth.

In 2016 I was banned from the campus of the College of Charleston for a Woodrow Wilson quote, and forced into retirement.  See Inside Higher Ed 8Aug16 for a review of the controversy.  Ultimately my lawsuit was settled for enough money to set up the FWGNA Project as a sole proprietor consultancy, and I hope to live out the rest of my days in peace, doing what I want to do, which is science.

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 [FWGNA History].  In 25 years the FWGNA Project has covered all or part of 22 southern, eastern and midwestern states.  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 and Arkansas.