Host: Prof. Berry Pinshow
Current Position: Reserve Director, Philip L. Boyd Canyon Desert Research Center, University of California Natural Reserve System, USA
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My current position is Reserve Director for the Philip L. Boyd Deep Canyon Desert Research Center, one of the 41 reserves in the University of California Natural Reserve System. I spent two periods at BIDR, the first in 1991 for a special series of graduate short-courses in Desert Ecology just before I started as a master's degree student at University of Oklahoma in Zoology. I then did a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin Madison (Zoology), where I worked with Warren Porter, whom Berry Pinshow had worked with as a postdoc, and Bill Karasov, who had been an instructor in 1991. After two years of postdoctoral work in Darwin, Australia, I returned to BIDR in 2004-2005 as a postdoc with Berry Pinshow and Bill Karasov.
The times I spent at BIDR had a profound influence on my career. The series of short courses in 1991 introduced me to a cross-section of leading faculty in various subdisciplines in Ecology, who I later regularly met and talked with at national and international conferences. This was a big boost of confidence for a student just starting graduate school. Those courses led to offers to study with more than one of the instructors, and later, to the postdoc in 2004-2005 that was with two of those instructors. My time as a postdoc launched my career as a faculty member and ultimately as Director of the Deep Canyon Reserve. During that postdoc, I met colleagues I continue to work and teach with to this day. The time I spent at BIDR also made me realize how much I enjoy living and working in a remote, desert research facility, so when the position of Director at Deep Canyon opened, I knew it would be a great fit for me.