Welcome to the Chair's Page

After almost 20 great years of leading our Department as Chair, Larry Wiseman retired in the summer of 2004.  Especially in the last dozen years, Larry, along with Eric Bradley during some of those years, hired and developed the new group of faculty who now represent over two thirds of the Department.  As one of those hires, I'm part of that group, and now a new Department Chair, trying to live up to their high standards.

Larry and Eric both felt strongly that People build a great department, and that the Biology Department should have, above all, a faculty with integrity, energy, and intelligence. Both of them wanted faculty with the potential to be great teachers and great researchers.  By any measure, we've been successful in both. We've done it in William and Mary style, by using talent to find resources and equipment wherever we can to succeed in (poor old) Millington Hall. Especially in lean budget years, that's been tough.  The team we've become has had to develop unique abilities to meet current challenges as William and Mary struggles to maintain excellence on a budget.

Students are the second half of a Department, and I'm convinced that student qualities are at least as important as those of the faculty.  It was the promise of great students that attracted me here, and it's been both great colleagues and great students that have kept me here.  I believe that great students learn from great teachers, but will find ways to learn even without teachers.  The combination of skilled and enthusiastic teachers with skilled and enthusiastic students, when it happens, pushes both to levels they couldn't have reached alone.  That's something I believe that we achieve..  Our combination of people, along with high expectations both for faculty and students, is what makes our Department work so well--not for everyone, and not all the time, but for most of us students and faculty most of the time.

Last year, I asked Mitchell Byrd, another long-time Chair of our Department, for advice on being a Chair.  Mitchell hired the core of faculty and oversaw the facilities that made the Department a great place when I arrived here in 1994. Mitchell is currently Professor Emeritus and still intensely active in research and conservation with the Center for Conservation Biology on campus.  His advice on being Chair: "Listen to everyone.  Then make up your own mind what's right and do it."  I'm trying to follow that advice.

        Paul