Spring
2003
FACULTY
NEWS
INSTITUTE GETS NEW DIRECTOR
by Laurie Anderson
Pending the approval of the Board of Regents, the Institute of Ecology’s
next director will be Alan
P. Covich, of Colorado State University’s Department
of Fishery and Wildlife Biology.
Dr. Covich served as head of that department from 1993 - 1998, and prior
to that was the assistant head of the zoology department at the University
of Oklahoma (1976 - 1993). He established ties with the Institute as a
visiting scientist at the Coweeta Hydrologic Laboratory (1989-1990).
“I am especially excited about the prospects of helping to build
a strong interdisciplinary ecology program at UGA,” he told current
director Ronald Carroll. While acknowledging
recent budget cuts at UGA, “given the current strengths, I see many
opportunities for growth and for sustaining what we can all agree will
be important for the future,” he added.
Covich’s research interests include assembly and function of stream
food webs; predator-prey chemosensory communication; species-specific
roles in detrital processing chains; redundancy in stream communities
and ecosystem functions in temperate and tropical streams. In 1997 he
was awarded the Icko Iben Award for Excellence (in interdisciplinary work)
by the American Water Resources
Association, and elected a Fellow of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science in 1999. In 2000 Covich
served as president of the American
Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), previously as chair of the
Aquatic Ecology
Section of the Ecological Society of America, and currently serves
on the International
Association of Ecology (INTECOL) Board of Directors. He is especially
interested in tropical stream food webs and continues to work at the National
Science Foundation' s Long
Term Ecological Research Program in the Luquillo Experimental Forest
in Puerto Rico.
This page last updated June 9, 2003.
|
