Edward TheriotDr. Ed Theriot is a Louisiana native who has lived in Louisiana, Texas, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming, pursuing a career in biology. He received a B.S. in Zoology and M.S. in Fisheries Biology at Louisiana State University and, in 1983, a Ph.D. in Natural Resources at the University of Michigan. From there he went to Texas A&M University as a post-doctoral associate in the Department of Oceanography. His research career in the study of freshwater biology returned him to Michigan and Louisiana throughout the 1980’s. In 1990, he became a curator and then Vice-President at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, the oldest natural history museum in the western hemisphere.
Ed came to The University of Texas at Austin in January 1997 as director of the Texas Memorial Museum and holds the Jane and Roland Blumberg Centennial Professorship in Molecular Evolution in the Section of Integrative Biology. He has conducted field research throughout much of the western US, the midwestern US, and the Mississippi River basin as well as in Guatemala, Mexico, China, Finland, and France. He continues to be involved in the Tree of Life project, conducted through the National Science Foundation.