It's August 2nd. I haven't yet posted on this lab blog in 2020. I did write some posts for my Applied Plant Ecology course blog. BIOL 4095 ran from January to April 2020. One of its 11 topics is invasive, non-indigenous organisms, which meant that I began including the spread of the novel virus, Sars-cov-2 […]

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Members of the York University delegation to COP25 on Madrid will be reporting back to the community on January 14th, 2020 (details left). I've been teaching undergraduate and graduate students about the greenhouse effect, global warming and climate change since 1992, when I taught my first applied plant ecology course at York University. I couldn't […]

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When I realized that the first of my six catch-up 2019 blog posts was really long, I split it into three posts! Some thoughts about my past thirty years as a professor: 1990 to now As I juggled my family with research, teaching and administrative duties during the 1990s, I realized that my kind of […]

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When I realized that the first of my six catch-up 2019 blog posts was really long, I split it into three posts! Some thoughts about my past decade in academia: 2000-19 In 2010, I was three and half years into what would become a seven-year, four-term stint as director of the pan-university Institute for Research […]

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I will always have a soft spot for Google, hailing back to 1999 when I used to recommend it to my ecology students, as a cool up-and-coming internet search engine. This continues, despite my fairly strong opinions about the need for tech giants to be regulated, and for large portions of their staff, including the […]

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It's December 30, 2019. I know that many colleagues will either be submitting the last of their Fall Term grades, or casting their minds forward to their Winter Term teaching. I'm in the latter group. I hope that student members of the academic community are resting, having fun and catching up on their sleep, and […]

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I have had the pleasure of working with professional journalists since the 1990s, because, since I was in high school, I have always held the view that publicly-funded science should be made accessible to the public. And, since I'm a political junkie, I have always seen a connection between science and politics, and the public […]

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Science Twitter brings connections near and far. One local young scientist, whom I met through Twitter, who continues to impress me, is #SciComm-er extraordinaire, University of Toronto doctoral student Ms. Farah Qaiser. Last Fall, Farah kindly invited me to be the guest speaker at Gerstein Library's Wikipedia Editathon in celebration of February's International Day of […]

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"You won't get asked to write a multiple choice exam as a feature of your job after you graduate with a Yorku Biology degree, but you will probably be asked to write memos and reports." In fact, this is not strictly correct, because, if you are a first-responder for your organization, you will have to […]

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Happy New Year! The days are getting longer and in the northern hemisphere's educational institutions, a new term will begin in a few days. I'm looking forward to teaching two biology courses: Plant Ecology and Plant Biology. Both have lots of cool labs with PLANTS, fungi and every kind of taxa, except for animals. As […]

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