Thomas W. Sherry

Professor Sherry has taught at Tulane since Spring, 1989, after extensive studies at Dartmouth College (undergraduate, MS degree, and post-doc) and UCLA (Ph.D. dissertation). He is married with two grown children, and enjoys gardening, watching birds, hiking and camping, cooking, and enjoying New Orleans Jazz, food, and other aspects of its rich culture. His research has focused on understanding the population and community ecology of migration, especially long-distance migration of New World wood warblers (Parulidae) wintering in the Caribbean region. He has worked in Jamaica since 1986. Another research interest is foraging, feeding ecology, and diets, mostly focusing on birds that eat insects. Since studying tropical birds extensively, including both migratory birds wintering in the Caribbean and resident tropical birds, he is now working on a book on the evolution of specialization in tropical insectivorous birds, and consequences of this specialization for understanding biological communities including the vulnerability of tropical organisms to global change. In most of his teaching and research, Professor Sherry is passionate about addressing climate change and other environmental threats.

Professor Sherry has taught a variety of courses at Tulane, including Vertebrate Morphology, Population Ecology, and Evolution. He now teaches General Ecology (for all EE Biology majors) and Conservation Biology (for Environmental Biology majors). He uses a variety of pedagogies, including lecturing (flipped classroom), writing-intensive projects, and lots of student-centered classroom activities.