Last night I had dinner with Geerat Vermeij--a man who can examine a shell and understand its history whether hundreds of millions of years old or newly collected on the seashore. He's one of the world's most famous paleoecologists and has published on subjects ranging from leaf morphology to bird evolution. I've been interested to chat with the Distinguished Professor from UC Davis ever since reading about his research to understand evolution.
It also happens that Geerat Vermeij is blind. And yet, he sees what others do not...
My post is now up over at Correlations on this inspiring individual.
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Sheril, Isn't Geerat amazing? I studied with him when I was an undergraduate at UC-Davis years ago. I loved going into his office to chat with him, such a pleasant person who is so worldly and talented. I went in often and he would show me shells and we would talk about evolution, grad school and inverts! I still correspond with him and send him shells for his collection. He inspired (and still does) me alot and the world is better for having him here.
Ok, going over now to read your interview!
You had dinner with Vermeij? I'd love to meet him! He's one of the greatest evolutionary biologists of our time!
What's he like in person?
Highly recommend his book "Biogeography and Adaptation: Patterns of Marine Life". It's a great read.
Geerat Vermeij is a cool guy. Besides being the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award, he's smart, nice to talk to, and very interested in promoting evolution. I interviewed him on my show a couple years ago,
http://www.inoculatedmind.com/2006/03/03/episode-27/
And he also participated in a panel discussion on Evolution that I helped put together before that.
Esref Armagan: Another amazing visually impaired person.
My evolution prof, Michael Turelli, always talked about what an extreme bad ass Vermeij is. Coming from a guy who's collaborated with Jerry Coyne, Nick Barton and the like, I'll trust Turelli on that one...
Cool. I served on a board with his wife often & enjoyed his wisdom. We need more people like him.
Best,
D
Vermeij is amazing -- I went through UCDavis as well, but in psychology...one year, he came over to talk at our perception/cognition seminar series on the tactile phenomenology of his work. He showed the various techniques he uses get detailed information about physical topographies at different perceptual scales -- like how he uses syringe needles to probe for crevasses and fine-grained textures on shells that his sighted colleagues often miss.