Detailed Biography of Dr. Joesph Travis

Joseph Travis is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of Biological Science at Florida State University and Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania and his doctoral degree from Duke University. Travis joined the faculty in Biological Science at Florida State in 1980; he served as Chair of the Biological Science Department from 1991-1997 and from 2000-2005 as Director of the Program in Computational Science. He began his service as Dean in 2005.

The main goal of Travis’s research has been to understand why individuals of the same species are not all alike, that is, why they differ persistently in features that affect their chance of survival, likelihood of mating, or rate of reproduction. His early work with tadpoles investigated how predators, crowding, and environmental uncertainty maintained substantial variation in larval period and size at metamorphosis when it would appear at first glance that all tadpoles would be better off with short larval periods and large sizes at metamorphosis. Subsequent work focused on the ecological factors that maintain extensive variation among populations in the body size, life history and reproductive behavior of the sailfin molly (Poecilia latipinna), a livebearing fish native to the southeastern US. His present research on another native livebearer, the least killifish, Heterandria formosa, is looking at how predators and the physical environment create different patterns of population numbers in different locations, which in turn promote different patterns of mating and life history.

Travis has served on the editorial boards of Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Oecologia, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, and The American Naturalist. He served as editor of The American Naturalist from 1998 to 2002 and as Vice-President (1994) and President (2005) of the American Society of Naturalists. He currently serves as President-Elect of the American Institute of Biological Sciences and will serve as President in 2010. In 1991, he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has served on advisory panels for the National Science Foundation, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis.

Travis has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals, along with over two dozen invited reviews and five edited volumes from scientific symposia. Students from the Travis lab have published over 50 peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals. Travis is the co-author and co-editor, with Michael Ruse, of Evolution: The First Four Billion Years, published in 2009 by Harvard University Press.

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