Positions Available
Professor of Ichthyology and Biodiversity Research Institute Director/Curator of Fishes
The Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology (EEB) at Tulane University invites applications for a faculty position in Ichthyology (associate or full professor rank) who will also serve as Director of the Tulane University Biodiversity Research Institute (TUBRI) and Curator of the Royal D. Suttkus Fish Collection. See https://sse.tulane.edu/eebio/about/positions/Professor-of-Ichthyology for additional details about the position, the department and TUBRI. To apply please visit https://apply.interfolio.com/117771. Review of applications will begin January 2, 2023. The search will remain open until the position is filled. Tulane University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Employment Opportunity/ADA Employer. Women and minorities are encouraged to apply.
Research Opportunities
In addition to the research opportunities regional habitats afford, Tulane offers various opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborations within the university and with other regional institutions. The EEB Department collaborates closely with the Department of Earth and Environmental Science and the Department of River-Coastal Science and Engineering. See below for college and divisional affiliations:
- The Stone Center for Latin American Studies
- ByWater Institute
Our program in global change biology, for example, encompasses several collaborative research initiatives involving faculty in the School of Science and Engineering and the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, some of which are supported by the National Science Foundation. Similar collaborations exist with other area universities and with researchers at the National Wetlands Research Center (Department of the Interior) at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette.
The Department, University and New Orleans
As part of the university-wide reorganization and renewal plan following Hurricane Katrina, EEB resides in the School of Science and Engineering (SSE). The Department is in the Division of Earth and Ecological Science along with the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, with which we interact.
Applicants are encouraged to visit the web sites for Tulane University, the School of Science and Engineering, and the EEB Department for general information about faculty, courses, and academic programs.
Tulane University’s Uptown Campus has a symbiotic relationship with New Orleans. New Orleans' unique culture helps shape the educational and social experiences of the entire Tulane community, while the University plays a major role in the city's vitality, including healthcare, economy, education and continued disaster recovery.
Departmental Mission
Our faculty, postdocs, and students – graduate and undergraduate alike – create, communicate, and apply knowledge of organisms, populations, communities, ecosystems and global systems. We pursue our mission through integrative research and teaching in conservation biology, ecosystem ecology, evolutionary biology, quantitative ecology, tropical ecology, and systematic biology. Our research emphasizes the broad disciplinary areas of tropical biology, wetlands ecology, and global change biology. The faculty is dedicated to enriching the capacity of students to learn, think, act, lead and contribute across a wide range of disciplines, from biology, environmental science and conservation to law, medicine and public.
Faculty Size and Composition
EEB has ten tenured or tenure-track faculty representing a variety of scholarly fields within ecology and evolutionary biology. A diverse array of research areas among the department's tenured and tenure-track faculty strengthens its mission and ensures a robust level of contribution to the scientific community.
In addition to tenured or tenure-track faculty, the Department also has four Professors of the Practice (PoPs). The commitment of the PoPs to teaching undergraduate and graduate courses enables the Department to meet the course needs of students while allowing tenured and tenure-track faculty to maintain highly productive research programs.
Graduate Program
At present 26 doctoral students and 13 master’s students are enrolled in the EEB graduate program. EEB PhD students typically receive tuition waivers coupled with financial support through various funding sources. Support opportunities range university teaching assistantships, research assistantships, or external fellowship awards (ex. NIH, NSF, etc.)
The graduate program in EEB was reviewed by an external panel in 2015 as part of a review of science departments at Tulane. The evaluation of the Department was very positive: “The Tulane EEB department has recruited a very strong group of young faculty…who are well funded, productive scholars. Along with this growth and renewal of the EEB faculty has come a growth and renewal of the EEB PhD program....”
Undergraduate Program
Tulane is a highly selective university that offers abundant opportunities for innovative undergraduate teaching. The EEB Department encourages faculty to explore traditional instructional venues, such as lecture, laboratory, and seminar courses, as well as specialized honors seminars, writing-intensive courses, service-learning, courses for freshmen, field courses, collaborative teaching, interdisciplinary colloquia, and independent studies and undergraduate honors thesis research.
The EEB Department offers two majors, one in ecology and evolutionary biology and the other in environmental biology. There are approximately 80 undergraduate EEB majors in either the traditional ecology and evolutionary biology track or the environmental biology track.
Departmental Resources
The EEB Department presently shares facilities in three buildings (Lindy Boggs Center, Israel Bioenvironmental Sciences Building and Stern Hall) on the uptown campus.
The Department has custody of several nationally recognized museum collections. Most notable are the zoological collections of the Tulane University Museum of Natural History, including the Royal D. Suttkus Fish Collection (a National Center of Ichthyology Research Resource collection; over 7,000,000 specimens) and other collections in herpetology (90,000 specimens) and invertebrate zoology (25,000 specimens). The zoological collections emphasize fauna of the Gulf South region and are housed off campus at a facility in Belle Chasse 15 miles from the main campus.
On-campus and off-campus greenhouses include several thousand square feet for teaching and research use. Faculty research laboratories also house shared walk-in or cabinet growth chambers, as well as satellite vivariums for ichthyofaunal and herpetofaunal studies.
University and Interdisciplinary Resources
A 500-acre tract of bottomland hardwood forest in Belle Chasse, 15 miles from the main campus, serves as a biological field station. This facility is available for faculty and student research as well as an outdoor laboratory for EEB courses.
Computational resources are available through the Center for Computational Sciences at Tulane. The CCS offers access to Linux clusters, Ares and Sphynx, for single-processor or parallel computing, specialized software, and full hardware/software administration. New nodes can easily be added to the cluster by individual faculty. Supercomputing resources are also available on the Louisiana Optical Network Initiative (LONI) grid, of which Tulane is part. The CCS also offers multi-disciplinary research projects, seminars, and opportunities for collaborations and hosting postdocs.
The ByWater Institute exemplifies the interdisciplinary ethos of the university. By supporting applied research and outreach, the center will help strengthen capacity to restore and protect the coast. The ByWater Institute manages the Tulane River and Coastal Center, which is home to active laboratories for sediment dynamics research and is a collaborative hub for scholars from other like-minded organizations, such the Department of River-Coastal Science and Engineering and The Water Institute of the Gulf.
International Programs and Facilities at Tulane
Tulane has a long and distinguished record of tropical and subtropical research distributed among several departments and research centers. The Department and the University have considerable infrastructure supporting tropical studies.
EEB faculty and graduate students currently are conducting research in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Jamaica, Trinidad, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, Suriname, and Brazil. Tulane maintains membership in the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS), a consortium of North American and Latin American universities and research institutions dedicated primarily to tropical education and research. OTS membership benefits Tulane by facilitating contact with other tropical ecologists, supporting graduate-level tropical biology courses for Tulane students (typically one student attends an OTS course annually), and supporting Tulane undergraduate study abroad programs in Costa Rica and South Africa.
The Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies offers opportunity for multidisciplinary research and teaching with emphasis on Latin American ecology and environmental issues. CLAS is one of the pre-eminent Latin-Americanist institutions in the country. CLAS also provides internal financial support for graduate student research.
Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Design Thinking and Social Innovation cultivates a diverse learning community of change-makers who use their skills, humility, expertise, gifts, and power to affirm the humanity of all people in the pursuit of a more just, sustainable, and equitable society. Their programs are grounded in the teaching, research, and practices of design thinking, social entrepreneurship, and social innovation.
The Howard-Tilton Memorial Library (the University's general reference library), the Meade Natural History Library, and the Latin American Library all provide excellent support and reference materials for all types of biological research, but especially for research emphasizing tropical and subtropical biology. Additional resources are available through interlibrary loans and extensive electronic retrieval services.
