Member

Eric has been a field biologist for the past several decades and has traversed the Holarctic seeking to discover the connections in this complex tapestry of life that is the biota of northern latitudes. He is a biogeographer who describes the myriad of patterns, structure, and interactions linking intricate host-parasite systems across oceans and tundra in evolutionary and ecological time. He has always been a field biologist and has had extraordinary voyages on research ships, great wooden-hulled boats, and sleek dories following multitudes of seabirds across the tumultuous Bering Sea, North Pacific basin and Sea of Okhotsk, and into the Southern Ocean to Antarctica. On the open expanses of the tundra he has watched the passage of great herds of caribou and isolated bands of musk oxen, as his studies delve into biodiversity and responses of complex systems to global change. Eric was born in the city of San Francisco, on October 18, 1953, and as a native Californian has a certain appreciation of the West. He was raised in Redwood City and spent a fair amount of his youth wandering the hills along the San Andreas and adjacent coastal ranges overlooking the Pacific, while collecting insects, various herps, and watching birds in residence and migration. His summers were spent with his parents and brother chasing wild trout on the Pit River of northern California under sweeping forests of Ponderosa Pine in the shadow of Shasta and Lassen. Eric arrived in Alaska in 1971 to pursue biology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and found his interests in ornithology and parasitology and his passion for the north. Following a master’s degree at the University of Saskatchewan in 1979, and doctoral research at the University of Washington in 1984, he has been immersed in systematics, phylogenetics, coevolution, and historical biogeography. His career has taken him to the Atlantic Veterinary College, University of Prince Edward Island from 1989 to 1990, and to his current position as chief curator of the U.S. National Parasite Collection of the Agriculture Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture from 1990. With science has been satisfaction; however, there is nothing finer than a perfect drift of a miniscule “black francis,” and the first surging leap of a heavy salmon from the blackened depths of the Myrkhylur at days end in fading sunrays near midnight. Eric was elected to membership in the Washington Biologists’ Field Club in 2004.