Rob Dunn

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Rob Dunn (* approx. 1975 ), also Rob Roberdeau Dunn , is an American biologist, writer and professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at North Carolina State University . He has written numerous popular science books. His scientific essays have appeared in magazines such as BBC Wildlife Magazine , Scientific American , Smithsonian Magazine , National Geographic, and others. Dunn is known for his efforts to involve the public as Citizen Scientists , for example in studies of arthropods and the human microbiome . His projects also include studies of navel biodiversity , termites on human droppings , ants in backyards, and fungi and bacteria in houses. He completed a Fulbright Research Fellowship in Australia.

Life

Dunn grew up in the then rural town of Hartland, Michigan . He liked to spend his youth in nature, where he was interested in snakes, fish and turtles. The basement of his parents' house was always filled with animals. In 1997 he received his bachelor's degree in biology from Kalamazoo College . During his studies he traveled to Ecuador . There he and a friend were attacked by monkeys. In Ecuador, Dunn also lived in a small wooden hut by a river in the Guajalito Forest , where spectacled bears are common, and carried out a study on epiphytic bromeliads there . The study failed because horses ate his study objects.

Dunn received a Ph. D. in Ecology and Evolution from the University of Connecticut in 2003 . At the University of Connecticut, Dunn studied the renaturation (secondary succession / recovery) of tropical forests in Costa Rica , Peru and Bolivia after clear cutting and use for traditional agriculture. During that study, he came to the conclusion that he knew less about the rainforest than the average eight-year-old child in the Amazon . After completing his PhD, he became a Fulbright Fellow at Curtin University in Australia, where he conducted a study on the spread of seeds with Jonathan Majer and Byron Lamont . Seeds from rare and particular plant species are widely distributed in Australia by ants. The plants produce small, nutritious seed appendages ( elaiosomes ) that the ants consume and carry the seeds into their nests.

After his research stay, Dunn went to the University of Tennessee , Knoxville as a postdoctoral researcher . There he worked with Nate Sanders on the biodiversity of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park . This work led to his book Every Living Thing . Dunn and Sanders have often worked together since then and created the Global Ant Collaboration , a large study group of myrmecologists who study ants around the world. Dunn went to North Carolina State University in 2005, where he first worked in the Zoology Department, then in the Biology Department and now in the Biological Sciences Department.

At North Carolina State University, Dunn leads various projects:

  • “Yourwildlife.org” program, which aims to bring the general public closer to the species that humans encounter in everyday life.
  • "Students Discover"

His areas of work now include raccoons , bacterial biodiversity in houses, giant crickets in houses and the bacterial flora of the human navel, which is summarized as navel biodiversity . In his popular science books, he deals with rather unusual questions: How to find a new super-heavy element (transuranic elements), why men are bald, how modern chickens have developed, whether a virus can make you fat, or the beauty of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence , the biology of insect eggs, the secret life of cats, the theory of ecological medicine , why our approach to thinking about calories is wrong, why monkeys (and earlier Homo sapiens) were more likely to give birth in the dark.

Works

  • Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys. HarperCollins Publishers 2009.
  • The Wild Life of Our Bodies. HarperCollins Publishers 2011.
  • The Man Who Touched His Own Heart. Little Brown 2015. A biography by Werner Forssmann .
  • Never Out of Season: How Having the Food We Want When We Want It Threatens Our Food Supply and Our Future. Little, Brown 2017.
  • Never home alone. Basic Books 2018.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Current Biology , “Q&A,” Vol. 25, Iss. 6, pages R212 – R214 , March 16, 2015.
  2. ↑ Rob Dunn - BBC Wildlife Magazine . Robrdunn.com. Retrieved June 13, 2014.
  3. ^ Bromeliad Communities in Isolated Trees and Three Successional Stages of an Andean Cloud Forest in Ecuador . Cache.kzoo.edu. Retrieved June 13, 2014.
  4. ^ Robert R. Dunn: Recovery of Faunal Communities During Tropical Forest Regeneration. In: Conservation Biology. Vol. 18, 2: 302-309. doi = 10.1111 / j.1523-1739.2004.00151.x; March 19, 2004.
  5. ^ Rob Dunn, Jaws of Life . Robrdunn.com. Retrieved June 13, 2014.
  6. ↑ http://www.robrdunn.com/2011/12/a-kick-in-the-pants-2/
  7. ↑ yourwildlife.org .
  8. ↑ newsobserver.com .
  9. ^ Education.yourwildlife.org .
  10. ↑ nationalgeographic.com .
  11. ↑ "Dr. Rob Dunn - About the Author “ HarperCollins.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Dunn, Rob
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dunn, Rob Roberdeau
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American biologist, university professor, and popular scientist author
DATE OF BIRTH around 1975