Frederick Edward Smith

Frederick "Fred" Edward Smith (born July 23, 1920 in Springfield , Massachusetts , † April 16, 2012 in Woods Hole , Massachusetts) was an American zoologist and ecologist .

Fred Smith earned a bachelor's degree in biology ( entomology ) from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1941 and - after dropping out of medicine - a Ph.D. in 1950 from George Evelyn Hutchinson at Yale University. in zoology.

In 1950 Smith got his first job as an instructor at the University of Michigan , where he rose to the chair of wildlife and fisheries. In 1967 he moved to the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University , where he served as an interim professor for landscape architecture in 1981/82 . Smith retired in 1982 at the age of 62. He left scant records and devoted himself to art and political and cultural duties.

Smith initially dealt primarily with "small ecology", the determination of population sizes and their factors. Smith co-published the influential paper Community Structure, Population Control, and Competition on trophic cascades in 1960 with Nelson Hairston and Lawrence B. Slobodkin . From his time at Harvard at the latest, Smith was more concerned with ecosystems and the transfer of his findings to urban planning and landscape architecture .

In 1971, Smith was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . 1973/1974 he was President of the Ecological Society of America (ESA). His textbook General Zoology (with Claude Villee and Warren Walker ) appeared in several editions.

He had been married to Marguerite "Peggy" Anderson since 1945, who died two months before him.

literature

• Robert T. Paine : Frederick Edward Smith: 1920–2012. In: Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America. 94, 2013, p. 20, doi : 10.1890 / 0012-9623-94.1.20 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Book of Members 1780 – present, Chapter S. (PDF; 1.4 MB) In: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org). Retrieved December 6, 2019 . 
2. ^ ESA Living Past Presidents. Retrieved December 6, 2019 .