Professor of Biology and
Director, Gault Nature Reserve
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I was born and grew up in Chicago, took a bachelor's degree in humanities at Michigan State University in 1969, a Master's degree in Botany in 1973 and a Ph.D in plant ecology at Wisconsin in 1976. I have been at McGill University since 1976 with the exception of sabbatics at Cornell, the University of Washington and Kyoto University, plus a stint as a Visiting Research Scientist in a government forestry lab in Hokkaido, northern Japan. My roots at McGill are in the Department of Biology, but I am also involved with the McGill School of Environment and with the Centre d’étude de la forêt (CEF: http://www.cef.ulaval.ca/index.php?n=Actualit%e9.Accueil), an inter-university team of professors in Québec who share interest in forest ecology. I am Director of the university's Gault Nature Reserve which is the core of the Mont St. Hilaire Biosphere Reserve. The Gault Nature Reserve is an old growth forest near Montreal that provides an important base for teaching and research.
As Director of the Gault Nature Reserve (http://www.mcgill.ca/gault), I am responsible for a variety of academic and outreach activities that raise public awareness of conservation issues on and around Mont St. Hilaire in the Richelieu River Valley east of Montreal. I manage the university partnership with the Mont St. Hilaire Nature Centre (http://centrenature.qc.ca), a community-based non-profit organization dedicated to conservation in the region. We host 170,000+ visitors to the reserve each year. We raise on the order of $250,000 per year from foundations and governments to purchase or protect green space in the region. In August 2001 I received the Distinguished Service Award from the Nature Conservation Centre in recognition of my support for community conservation efforts. I also develop teaching and research use of the reserve, provide infrastructural support for these activities, and communicate their nature and purpose to the general public through lectures, excursions and lay publications. The reserve is an important venue for training and research. There typically are 10-12 classes from 4 universities using the reserve and 20-30 ongoing research projects involving 15-20 research scientists. About 20 undergraduate assistants and graduate students live and work at the reserve in summers. We average 10-12 peer-reviewed papers per year based on work at the reserve, adding to over 550 previous publications.