We offer our most sincere thanks to three retiring faculty. Their many contributions to teaching, mentoring, research, and service have left a lasting imprint on countless undergraduate and graduate students, colleagues, and members of the community at UF and beyond. You will be sorely missed!
Harvey Lillywhite, Professor
Dr. Lillywhite served as faculty member from 1984 to 2021 in the former Zoology Department and current Biology Department. He spent 14 years as Director of the Seahorse Key Marine Laboratory, near Cedar Key on Florida’s Gulf coast. His research has focused on ecology and understanding adaptations of structure and function, especially in amphibians and reptiles, and his publications include over 320 research articles, abstracts, and book chapters. He is author of the Dictionary of Herpetology (2008) and How Snakes Work (2014), and he co-edited Islands and Snakes: Isolation and Adaptive Evolution (2019). Dr. Lillywhite has conducted field research in many regions of the world, including Costa Rica, Australia, India, Fiji, the Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan, and other parts of Asia. He held a Fulbright in India and has been a visiting lecturer or scientist at three Australian universities, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the San Diego Zoo, the NASA-Ames Research Laboratory, and Kyoto University. He presently serves on the editorial boards of four international journals. The University of Florida honored him with a Professional Excellence Award in 1996.
Michael Miyamoto, Professor
Dr. Miyamoto will be retiring at the end of 2021, following 35years of service in the former Zoology Department and current Biology Department. Dr. Miyamoto’s research and teaching have focused on genetics, genomics, and evolution. His most recent studies involve selection on the regulatory sequences for genes for the sense of smell in a Chinese marine fish and how RNA editing affects the dynamic interplay among viruses, their hosts, and host diseases. Dr. Miyamoto taught genetics forover30 years in our General Genetics and Introductory Biology courses, and he continues to serve as co-director for our Study Abroad class, Madagascar-Biodiversity and Conservation in a Developing Country.
Colette St. Mary, Professor
Dr. St. Mary served as a faculty member in the former Zoology Department and current Biology Department from 1995 to 2020, when she accepted a position with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to serve as a program director in the Division of Integrative Organismal Systems. Dr. St. Mary’s research has focused on how evolutionary processes—including natural and sexual selection, genetic drift, and mutation—affect life history traits, such as offspring size and number and parental investment. She has also studied how evolutionary processes affect animal personality, domestication, and cancer incidence. Dr. St Mary taught undergraduate courses in Introductory Biology and Evolution; her graduate teaching included Integrative Principles of Biology, Grant Writing, and Dynamic State Variable Modeling. She remains a highly valued colleague and mentor for many members of our community. We wish her every success in her new adventures at NSF, where she is overseeing programs including Behavioral Systems, Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases, Integrative Research in Biology, and Building Research Capacity of New Faculty in Biology.