ASP President 2013–2014, John Janovy Jr.: The Scientist, The Artist, The Writer, The Teacher, The Legend! Author(s): Matthew G. Bolek Source: Journal of Parasitology, 100(6):697-699. Published By: American Society of Parasitologists DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1645/14-635.1 URL: http://www.bioone.org/doi/full/10.1645/14-635.1
BioOne (www.bioone.org) is a nonprofit, online aggregation of core research in the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences. BioOne provides a sustainable online platform for over 170 journals and books published by nonprofit societies, associations, museums, institutions, and presses. Your use of this PDF, the BioOne Web site, and all posted and associated content indicates your acceptance of BioOne’s Terms of Use, available at www.bioone.org/page/terms_of_use. Usage of BioOne content is strictly limited to personal, educational, and non-commercial use. Commercial inquiries or rights and permissions requests should be directed to the individual publisher as copyright holder.
BioOne sees sustainable scholarly publishing as an inherently collaborative enterprise connecting authors, nonprofit publishers, academic institutions, research libraries, and research funders in the common goal of maximizing access to critical research.
J. Parasitol., 100(6), 2014, pp. 697–699 Ó American Society of Parasitologists 2014
ASP PRESIDENT 2013–2014, JOHN JANOVY JR.: THE SCIENTIST, THE ARTIST, THE WRITER, THE TEACHER, THE LEGEND! Matthew G. Bolek Associate Professor of Zoology, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, Oklahoma 74078. Correspondence should be sent to: [email protected]
Honored guests, friends, and fellow members of the American Society of Parasitologists, I would like to welcome you to the 2014 Presidential Address. Today, I am honored and privileged to introduce to you Dr. John Janovy Jr. as our ASP president. Before I ask John to present his address, I will highlight a few facts about John’s life and some of his numerous accomplishments. John was born in a small stucco house in Houma, Louisiana, in 1937. While in Louisiana, John’s father worked for the Louisiana Land and Exploration Company as a petroleum geologist, and John’s mother would take little Johnny to the Audubon Park zoo for entertainment. As a result, little Johnny developed a deep lifelong fascination with the biological and geological world. The family moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, around 1942, where John’s father took a job with the War Department and little Johnny attended kindergarten. Eventually the family moved to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where John lived out his adolescent years. As a child, John spent most of his time drawing and painting watercolors, reading, practicing the piano, shooting stuff with BB guns, and fishing (Fig. 1). He attended Classen High School in Oklahoma City where he took up swimming and playing the guitar, and he continued to fish and hunt. In 1955, John attended the University of Oklahoma (OU) where he tried out for the OU swim team and made it! In college, John majored in civil engineering but quickly switched to math because the calculus teacher was more interesting than the engineering faculty. While in college, John took up another one of his beloved hobbies, sailing, which he continues to this day. As a college senior, and during his last semester, one of John’s swim team buddies persuaded him to take Ornithology taught by the world famous ornithologist George M. Sutton. Among the members of that class was Jerry Esch, who most likely had an influence on John’s path toward parasitology, and they formed a life-long friendship. During that time, John met Karen, an art major, at a dorm dance in the fall of 1958. And as the story goes, John introduced himself to Karen as a business major from Montana. When I asked John why he used such an odd pickup line he told me that he thought it sounded exciting and exotic. Whatever you may think of John’s pickup line, Karen and John were married in August of 1961, and this year (2014) they will celebrate their 53rd wedding anniversary. By the middle of his last semester at OU, John decided to become an ornithologist because of his admiration for Dr. Sutton. After graduation, and in the fall of 1959, John went into the army as a 6 mo active duty Second Lieutenant in the artillery branch at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, and then to jump school at Ft. Benning, Georgia. He spent the next six and a half years in the active reserve as a communications officer in the 19th Corps Artillery headquarters in Oklahoma City. During the summer of
1960, he applied for graduate school in zoology at OU and took a summer school class, the Natural History of the Invertebrates, from Harley Brown. John was admitted to graduate school on probation and began his MS degree on the life history of a predatory ciliate, Dileptus anser, under the direction of Dr. Brown. While John was finishing his MS thesis, Karen took a secretarial job with the Oklahoma Academy of Sciences and worked in the office of the eminent parasitologist Dr. J. T. Self who, at the time, was secretary of the Academy. As a result, John came to know all the parasitology graduate students and heard stories about parasitology and J. T. Self all the time. With each story, and the description of those research projects, parasitology seemed more and more fascinating to John. So when John was finishing up his M.S. work during the spring of 1962, he asked Dr. Self if he would take him on as a grad student. Dr. Self agreed, and during the summer of 1962, John finally took his first parasitology course at the University of Oklahoma Biological Station. Not long after John started his doctoral work, Dr. Self was awarded an NSF grant, with Dr. Vernon Scott, a virologist at the OU Medical Center, and David Parmelee, an ornithologist at Emporia State, examining the intercontinental movement of viruses and parasites by migratory birds. Dr. Self offered John a research assistantship, and John spent the next 3 yr commuting to, and from, the Cheyenne Bottoms near Great Bend, Kansas, the main field site for his Ph.D. work. John’s Ph.D. project explored the transmission of malaria parasites between meadowlarks and starlings and their mosquito vectors, where John learned the unpredictability of field parasitology. By the end of those 3 yr, Karen and John had a 2-yr old daughter, and he was determined to find some other kind of research that he had more control over than a project involving the natural transmission of avian malarias. So he applied for a postdoctoral position with Dr. Leslie Stauber at Rutgers University who was doing experimental infections with several Leishmania donovani strains. John was accepted and spent the next year examining the energy metabolism in Leishmania species. In the fall of 1966, John and family in tow moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, where John accepted a position as a young Assistant Professor of Zoology in the Department of Zoology and Physiology at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL) (Fig. 2). UNL was an exciting place for a young parasitologist, and John had an opportunity to interact with other prominent parasitologists including Harold W. Manter and Mary Lou Pritchard, among others. Importantly, the same year that John began his Assistant Professor position at UNL, Brent Nickol, another eminent parasitologist, was hired in the department, and John and Brent began a long and fruitful friendship mentoring a new generation of parasitology undergraduate and graduate students.
DOI: 10.1645/14-635.1 697
698
THE JOURNAL OF PARASITOLOGY, VOL. 100, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2014
FIGURE 1. Little Johnny at age 5 or 6 near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on his first successful fishing expedition.
At UNL, John spent the next 14 yr working on comparative physiology and cell biology of trypanosomatids, including species of Leishmania and several genera of insect flagellates. That work attracted a number of really bright students, both graduates and undergrads, who ended up publishing some fascinating papers on the physiology and cell biology of trypanosomatids. However, in 1975, UNL opened Cedar Point Biological Station (CPBS), and John with family in tow moved for the summer to Ogallala, Nebraska, where John taught a Protozoology course with 13 students. Brent Nickol was the first director of CPBS, and 1 day Dr. Nickol suggested to John that he should develop and teach a course called Field Parasitology. That course in now legendary and ended up attracting a very large number of excellent and interesting students. As a result of the CPBS experience, in 1981, John got rid of all the trypanosomatid cultures and went back to being a field biologist working on the parasites of small fishes and invertebrates in western Nebraska. For the next 35 yr, John and family (for some of those years) moved each summer to CPBS where John continued his sailing adventures, and with his students, he developed a research program on the transmission, life cycles, and ecology of parasites of invertebrates, fish, and amphibians of the Great Plains. So what are some of John’s accomplishments? John has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters. His work has been funded by numerous granting agencies, including NSF and the World Health Organization. John has received more than 30 different honors and awards from numerous universities, agencies, and professional scientific societies, including the Paula and D. B. Varner Distinguished Professorship from UNL (1991 to present) and the American Society of Parasitologists Clark P. Read Mentorship Award in 2003. He has served on more than 30 different departmental, college, university, and professional society committees, including
FIGURE 2. John and Karen with friends in 1967 at the faculty dance club in Lincoln, Nebraska.
serving as the Secretary-Treasurer of the American Society of Parasitologists. John’s service to the university community and UNL as a whole has been truly exceptional, and he has always taken a leading role when it comes to university business. For example, John served as the Assistant Dean for the College of Arts and Sciences before he was awarded tenure. He also served as the Interim Director for the University of Nebraska State Museum on 2 occasions and as the Director of Cedar Point Biological Station, also on 2 occasions. Among all of his accomplishments, John is probably best known for his teaching endeavors. During the academic year, John usually taught 2 lower division large-enrollment undergraduate courses (150–250 students) and 2 upper division undergraduate courses (30 students). And during the summer he offered his legendary Field Parasitology course (24 students) at CPBS (Fig. 3). As a result of his teaching efforts, John was honored with numerous teaching awards including the University of Nebraska Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching. During his 45 yr career at UNL, John continued to offer a variety of courses including General Biology, General Zoology, Protozoology, Invertebrate Zoology, Advance Invertebrate Zoology, Parasitology, Field Parasitology, numerous undergraduate honors seminars and graduate seminars, and a course offered through the UNL English Department entitled Writing About Nature. Training graduate and undergraduate students in the laboratory was, and arguably still is, John’s true forte. John’s passion for mentoring is truly exceptional, and his advice to all of his students was simple yet effective, and that was ‘‘you should always be finishing something.’’ Since arriving at UNL, John has mentored 14 Ph.D., 18 M.S., and more than 50 undergraduate students under his direction. His mentoring philosophy has always been (1) to give a student a project they can finish in a
BOLEK—INTRODUCTION OF ASP PRESIDENT 2013–2014: JOHN JANOVY JR.
FIGURE 3. John Janovy Jr. with students collecting invertebrates at Otter Creek, Keith Co., Nebraska, in the legendary Field Parasitology course during the summer of 2009.
reasonable amount of time, (2) get out of their way, and (3) let those students make him look good. As a result of his mentoring skills, John’s students have been very successful. As another example, a significant number of undergraduate students working under John’s direction have published peer-reviewed papers as first authors and/or presented their research as oral presentations at regional and/or national parasitology meetings including the Southwestern Association of Parasitologists and the American Society of Parasitologists, with many receiving awards for their talks. His graduate students have also received numerous awards from ASP and regional parasitology societies including, but not limited to, the H. B. Ward Medal (W. L. Current), the Clark P. Read Young Investigator Award (Scott Snyder and Jillian
699
Detwiler), and the ASP Student Paper Competition Award (Richard Clopton, Scott Snyder, Ben Hanelt, and Matt Bolek) among many others. Incredibly, while being involved in research, university and society service, teaching, and mentoring, John has continued his passion and interest in the arts and writing. John continues to paint, and he is the author of 21 popular books on biology, science education, teaching pedagogy, and the arts. His drawings and watercolors have been featured in numerous local and national magazines and periodicals, and his books have been well received by the general public and include classics such as Keith County Journal, On Becoming a Biologist, and Dunwoody Pond: Reflections on the High Plains Wetlands and the Cultivation of Naturalists. He is also a co-author along with Larry Roberts and Steve Nadler on arguably the most popular parasitology textbook, Foundations of Parasitology (now in its 10th edition), used in most college and university parasitology courses in the country. We cannot also forget that John is also a father, and with Karen, they have raised 3 very successful children. With that brief introduction, and not to upset my former advisor for going over my 10 min time limit, it is my great honor to welcome to the podium my mentor, good friend, and former Ph.D. advisor, John Janovy Jr. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank John Janovy Jr. for providing me with numerous photographs for this presentation and especially Karen Janovy for providing me with the secret Janovy file containing numerous articles about John’s academic and artistic accomplishments. Additionally, I would like to thank Gabe Langford (Florida Southern College), Jillian Detwiler (University of Manitoba), and Ben Hanelt (University of New Mexico) for providing other details about John over the years. Finally, I would like to thank Melissa Bolek for her help in proofreading this introduction.
BioOne (www.bioone.org) is a nonprofit, online aggregation of core research in the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences. BioOne provides a sustainable online platform for over 170 journals and books published by nonprofit societies, associations, museums, institutions, and presses. Your use of this PDF, the BioOne Web site, and all posted and associated content indicates your acceptance of BioOne’s Terms of Use, available at www.bioone.org/page/terms_of_use. Usage of BioOne content is strictly limited to personal, educational, and non-commercial use. Commercial inquiries or rights and permissions requests should be directed to the individual publisher as copyright holder.
BioOne sees sustainable scholarly publishing as an inherently collaborative enterprise connecting authors, nonprofit publishers, academic institutions, research libraries, and research funders in the common goal of maximizing access to critical research.
J. Parasitol., 100(6), 2014, pp. 697–699 Ó American Society of Parasitologists 2014
ASP PRESIDENT 2013–2014, JOHN JANOVY JR.: THE SCIENTIST, THE ARTIST, THE WRITER, THE TEACHER, THE LEGEND! Matthew G. Bolek Associate Professor of Zoology, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, Oklahoma 74078. Correspondence should be sent to: [email protected]
Honored guests, friends, and fellow members of the American Society of Parasitologists, I would like to welcome you to the 2014 Presidential Address. Today, I am honored and privileged to introduce to you Dr. John Janovy Jr. as our ASP president. Before I ask John to present his address, I will highlight a few facts about John’s life and some of his numerous accomplishments. John was born in a small stucco house in Houma, Louisiana, in 1937. While in Louisiana, John’s father worked for the Louisiana Land and Exploration Company as a petroleum geologist, and John’s mother would take little Johnny to the Audubon Park zoo for entertainment. As a result, little Johnny developed a deep lifelong fascination with the biological and geological world. The family moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, around 1942, where John’s father took a job with the War Department and little Johnny attended kindergarten. Eventually the family moved to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where John lived out his adolescent years. As a child, John spent most of his time drawing and painting watercolors, reading, practicing the piano, shooting stuff with BB guns, and fishing (Fig. 1). He attended Classen High School in Oklahoma City where he took up swimming and playing the guitar, and he continued to fish and hunt. In 1955, John attended the University of Oklahoma (OU) where he tried out for the OU swim team and made it! In college, John majored in civil engineering but quickly switched to math because the calculus teacher was more interesting than the engineering faculty. While in college, John took up another one of his beloved hobbies, sailing, which he continues to this day. As a college senior, and during his last semester, one of John’s swim team buddies persuaded him to take Ornithology taught by the world famous ornithologist George M. Sutton. Among the members of that class was Jerry Esch, who most likely had an influence on John’s path toward parasitology, and they formed a life-long friendship. During that time, John met Karen, an art major, at a dorm dance in the fall of 1958. And as the story goes, John introduced himself to Karen as a business major from Montana. When I asked John why he used such an odd pickup line he told me that he thought it sounded exciting and exotic. Whatever you may think of John’s pickup line, Karen and John were married in August of 1961, and this year (2014) they will celebrate their 53rd wedding anniversary. By the middle of his last semester at OU, John decided to become an ornithologist because of his admiration for Dr. Sutton. After graduation, and in the fall of 1959, John went into the army as a 6 mo active duty Second Lieutenant in the artillery branch at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, and then to jump school at Ft. Benning, Georgia. He spent the next six and a half years in the active reserve as a communications officer in the 19th Corps Artillery headquarters in Oklahoma City. During the summer of
1960, he applied for graduate school in zoology at OU and took a summer school class, the Natural History of the Invertebrates, from Harley Brown. John was admitted to graduate school on probation and began his MS degree on the life history of a predatory ciliate, Dileptus anser, under the direction of Dr. Brown. While John was finishing his MS thesis, Karen took a secretarial job with the Oklahoma Academy of Sciences and worked in the office of the eminent parasitologist Dr. J. T. Self who, at the time, was secretary of the Academy. As a result, John came to know all the parasitology graduate students and heard stories about parasitology and J. T. Self all the time. With each story, and the description of those research projects, parasitology seemed more and more fascinating to John. So when John was finishing up his M.S. work during the spring of 1962, he asked Dr. Self if he would take him on as a grad student. Dr. Self agreed, and during the summer of 1962, John finally took his first parasitology course at the University of Oklahoma Biological Station. Not long after John started his doctoral work, Dr. Self was awarded an NSF grant, with Dr. Vernon Scott, a virologist at the OU Medical Center, and David Parmelee, an ornithologist at Emporia State, examining the intercontinental movement of viruses and parasites by migratory birds. Dr. Self offered John a research assistantship, and John spent the next 3 yr commuting to, and from, the Cheyenne Bottoms near Great Bend, Kansas, the main field site for his Ph.D. work. John’s Ph.D. project explored the transmission of malaria parasites between meadowlarks and starlings and their mosquito vectors, where John learned the unpredictability of field parasitology. By the end of those 3 yr, Karen and John had a 2-yr old daughter, and he was determined to find some other kind of research that he had more control over than a project involving the natural transmission of avian malarias. So he applied for a postdoctoral position with Dr. Leslie Stauber at Rutgers University who was doing experimental infections with several Leishmania donovani strains. John was accepted and spent the next year examining the energy metabolism in Leishmania species. In the fall of 1966, John and family in tow moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, where John accepted a position as a young Assistant Professor of Zoology in the Department of Zoology and Physiology at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL) (Fig. 2). UNL was an exciting place for a young parasitologist, and John had an opportunity to interact with other prominent parasitologists including Harold W. Manter and Mary Lou Pritchard, among others. Importantly, the same year that John began his Assistant Professor position at UNL, Brent Nickol, another eminent parasitologist, was hired in the department, and John and Brent began a long and fruitful friendship mentoring a new generation of parasitology undergraduate and graduate students.
DOI: 10.1645/14-635.1 697
698
THE JOURNAL OF PARASITOLOGY, VOL. 100, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2014
FIGURE 1. Little Johnny at age 5 or 6 near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on his first successful fishing expedition.
At UNL, John spent the next 14 yr working on comparative physiology and cell biology of trypanosomatids, including species of Leishmania and several genera of insect flagellates. That work attracted a number of really bright students, both graduates and undergrads, who ended up publishing some fascinating papers on the physiology and cell biology of trypanosomatids. However, in 1975, UNL opened Cedar Point Biological Station (CPBS), and John with family in tow moved for the summer to Ogallala, Nebraska, where John taught a Protozoology course with 13 students. Brent Nickol was the first director of CPBS, and 1 day Dr. Nickol suggested to John that he should develop and teach a course called Field Parasitology. That course in now legendary and ended up attracting a very large number of excellent and interesting students. As a result of the CPBS experience, in 1981, John got rid of all the trypanosomatid cultures and went back to being a field biologist working on the parasites of small fishes and invertebrates in western Nebraska. For the next 35 yr, John and family (for some of those years) moved each summer to CPBS where John continued his sailing adventures, and with his students, he developed a research program on the transmission, life cycles, and ecology of parasites of invertebrates, fish, and amphibians of the Great Plains. So what are some of John’s accomplishments? John has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters. His work has been funded by numerous granting agencies, including NSF and the World Health Organization. John has received more than 30 different honors and awards from numerous universities, agencies, and professional scientific societies, including the Paula and D. B. Varner Distinguished Professorship from UNL (1991 to present) and the American Society of Parasitologists Clark P. Read Mentorship Award in 2003. He has served on more than 30 different departmental, college, university, and professional society committees, including
FIGURE 2. John and Karen with friends in 1967 at the faculty dance club in Lincoln, Nebraska.
serving as the Secretary-Treasurer of the American Society of Parasitologists. John’s service to the university community and UNL as a whole has been truly exceptional, and he has always taken a leading role when it comes to university business. For example, John served as the Assistant Dean for the College of Arts and Sciences before he was awarded tenure. He also served as the Interim Director for the University of Nebraska State Museum on 2 occasions and as the Director of Cedar Point Biological Station, also on 2 occasions. Among all of his accomplishments, John is probably best known for his teaching endeavors. During the academic year, John usually taught 2 lower division large-enrollment undergraduate courses (150–250 students) and 2 upper division undergraduate courses (30 students). And during the summer he offered his legendary Field Parasitology course (24 students) at CPBS (Fig. 3). As a result of his teaching efforts, John was honored with numerous teaching awards including the University of Nebraska Foundation Award for Distinguished Teaching. During his 45 yr career at UNL, John continued to offer a variety of courses including General Biology, General Zoology, Protozoology, Invertebrate Zoology, Advance Invertebrate Zoology, Parasitology, Field Parasitology, numerous undergraduate honors seminars and graduate seminars, and a course offered through the UNL English Department entitled Writing About Nature. Training graduate and undergraduate students in the laboratory was, and arguably still is, John’s true forte. John’s passion for mentoring is truly exceptional, and his advice to all of his students was simple yet effective, and that was ‘‘you should always be finishing something.’’ Since arriving at UNL, John has mentored 14 Ph.D., 18 M.S., and more than 50 undergraduate students under his direction. His mentoring philosophy has always been (1) to give a student a project they can finish in a
BOLEK—INTRODUCTION OF ASP PRESIDENT 2013–2014: JOHN JANOVY JR.
FIGURE 3. John Janovy Jr. with students collecting invertebrates at Otter Creek, Keith Co., Nebraska, in the legendary Field Parasitology course during the summer of 2009.
reasonable amount of time, (2) get out of their way, and (3) let those students make him look good. As a result of his mentoring skills, John’s students have been very successful. As another example, a significant number of undergraduate students working under John’s direction have published peer-reviewed papers as first authors and/or presented their research as oral presentations at regional and/or national parasitology meetings including the Southwestern Association of Parasitologists and the American Society of Parasitologists, with many receiving awards for their talks. His graduate students have also received numerous awards from ASP and regional parasitology societies including, but not limited to, the H. B. Ward Medal (W. L. Current), the Clark P. Read Young Investigator Award (Scott Snyder and Jillian
699
Detwiler), and the ASP Student Paper Competition Award (Richard Clopton, Scott Snyder, Ben Hanelt, and Matt Bolek) among many others. Incredibly, while being involved in research, university and society service, teaching, and mentoring, John has continued his passion and interest in the arts and writing. John continues to paint, and he is the author of 21 popular books on biology, science education, teaching pedagogy, and the arts. His drawings and watercolors have been featured in numerous local and national magazines and periodicals, and his books have been well received by the general public and include classics such as Keith County Journal, On Becoming a Biologist, and Dunwoody Pond: Reflections on the High Plains Wetlands and the Cultivation of Naturalists. He is also a co-author along with Larry Roberts and Steve Nadler on arguably the most popular parasitology textbook, Foundations of Parasitology (now in its 10th edition), used in most college and university parasitology courses in the country. We cannot also forget that John is also a father, and with Karen, they have raised 3 very successful children. With that brief introduction, and not to upset my former advisor for going over my 10 min time limit, it is my great honor to welcome to the podium my mentor, good friend, and former Ph.D. advisor, John Janovy Jr. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank John Janovy Jr. for providing me with numerous photographs for this presentation and especially Karen Janovy for providing me with the secret Janovy file containing numerous articles about John’s academic and artistic accomplishments. Additionally, I would like to thank Gabe Langford (Florida Southern College), Jillian Detwiler (University of Manitoba), and Ben Hanelt (University of New Mexico) for providing other details about John over the years. Finally, I would like to thank Melissa Bolek for her help in proofreading this introduction.
