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Ronald
J. Schusterman is a Marine Biologist Emeritus and Adjunct Professor of
Ocean Sciences at the University of California at Santa Cruz and Professor
Emeritus at California State University at Hayward. He was educated at
Brooklyn College and then Florida State University, where he was mentored
by Winthrop Kellogg and introduced to the study of chimpanzees and dolphins.
Ron took his first research position at the original Yerkes Laboratory
of Primate Behavior in Orange Park, Florida, where he investigated the
cognitive and social behavior of chimpanzees, gibbons, and monkeys. In
1963, he moved to the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in order to develop
the first laboratory in North America primarily devoted to the study of
the behavior and sensory physiology of pinnipeds. At SRI, Ron helped to
debunk the notion that pinnipeds echolocated like dolphins and bats, and
embarked on a research program dealing with vision and hearing in pinnipeds.
Ron and his sea lions relocated to the Ecological Field Station at California
State University at Hayward in 1971, where Ron served as a professor Psychology
and Biology and he and his sea lions began working on an ambitious research
program involving a gestural artificial sign language. In 1985, Ron made
his last move, and settled his program at the University of California's
Long Marine Laboratory. At LML, which is located in Santa Cruz, Schusterman
continues to explore the sensory systems, perception, cognition, and communication
of marine mammals in lab and field studies.
Ron
is a founding member of the Society for Marine Mammalogy and a fellow
of the Animal Behavior Society, Acoustical Society of America, the American
Psychological Association, and the American Association for the Advancement
of Science. In addition to the time he spends at LML, Ron regularly spends
time writing and teaching at other institutions - most recently at Columbia
University, the Aquarium for Wildlife Conservation in New York, and the
Konrad Lorenz Institute in Altenberg, Austria.
Ron
is extremely proud of the students he has been associated with over the
past forty years and still actively mentors a small group of graduate
students at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The Schusterman Festschrift was held April 25th, 2003 at Long Marine Lab.
Click here to see the pictures
from the event!
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