Last month, the UC Press staff was thrilled to host Professor Drew Harvell at our headquarters. Throughout the year, UC Press invites authors to visit us in Oakland for an ongoing “Lunchtime Author Talk” lecture series, where they discuss their research and recently published books to the entire press.
Drew Harvell, author of Ocean Outbreak (2019) and A Sea of Glass (2016, and recently available in a paperback edition), is Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University and Curator of the Blaschka Marine Invertebrate Collection. Her research on the sustainability of marine ecosystems has taken her from the reefs of Mexico, Indonesia, and Hawaii to the cold waters of the Pacific Northwest. She is a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America and the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, a winner of the Society of American Naturalist Jasper Loftus-Hills Award, and a lead author of the oceans chapter in the recent U.S. Climate Change Assessment. She has published over 120 articles in journals such as Science, Nature, and Ecology and is coeditor of The Ecology and Evolution of Inducible Defenses.
In her lecture (captured on the video below), Professor Harvell outlines her career as a marine biologist, including her time spent living in an underwater research habitat, her role in determining the cause of and responses to the 2013 Starfish Plague, and her quest to understand the legacy of a German family’s glass rendition of endangered marine species.