Host: Prof. Berry Pinshow
Current Position: Reserve Director, Philip L. Boyd Canyon Desert Research Center, University of California Natural Reserve System, USA
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.
