John Pearse, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology, will give the Emeriti Faculty Lecture at UC Santa Cruz on Tuesday, November 23. His talk, "Reproduction in Freezing Oceans: Paradigm Shifts in the 20th Century," will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the UCSC Media Theater. This event is free and open to the public.
Pearse is one of the world's leading experts on marine invertebrates and intertidal ecology. His research includes investigations of the reproductive ecology of sea urchins and other marine animals, as well as long-term monitoring of intertidal life on the shores of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
In his lecture, presented by the UCSC Emeriti Faculty Association, Pearse will talk about how animals that live on the bottoms of polar seas reproduce. Pearse, who has done research on this subject himself, said that scientists' ideas about the biology of marine animals in cold waters have undergone major shifts over the course of the past 100 years. In his talk, Pearse will give an overview of these ideas and how they have changed as scientists learned more about marine life in harsh polar environments.
Pearse has received numerous awards and honors during his career, including several teaching awards from UCSC and the American University of Cairo, Egypt, where he taught before coming to UCSC in 1971. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has served as president of several scientific organizations, including the California Academy of Sciences, the Western Society of Naturalists, and the International Society of Invertebrate Reproduction. He is currently president-elect of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology.
The Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary has honored Pearse several times, most recently as the 2004 Ricketts Memorial Lecturer. He received the sanctuary's annual recognition award twice, for science in 1994 and for education in 2003.
The Emeriti Faculty Lecture is sponsored by the Office of the Chancellor. For more information about the lecture, call (831) 459-1438.
