About me

Founder and leading exponent of environmental endocrinology. Through 500 publications, elucidated the hormonal bases of circadian and annual rhythms, of life history stages, and of coping with natural environmental stressors from the tropics to the tundra. Early on, led endocrinological studies from the laboratory out into the field, thereby discovering and defining many of the hormonal conflicts that organisms face when transitioning between life history stages (e.g., migration and breeding) or dealing with stress. Mentored scores of students and postdoctoral fellows who now hold prominent academic positions around the world. Served as a departmental chair, editor of top journals, President of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) and an International Ornithological Congress. Also served as Assistant Director and Head of the Biological Sciences Directorate at the National Science Foundation (NSF), reporting directly to the director. As leader of one of NSF's seven research directorates, oversaw a budget of $730 million, about 65% of non-biomedical biology research funding in the United States. He returned as a Distinguished Professor, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, University of California, Davis, in October 2014.