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Wildlife Biologist to Present Annual Morrow Lecture and Biological Sciences Research Symposium Keynote at Western April 6-7

March 20, 2017

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MACOMB, IL – Internationally recognized wildlife biologist Scott Mills will deliver the annual Roger and Jean Morrow Lecture Thursday, April 6 at Western Illinois University.

Mills will deliver "Adapt and Persist: How Seven Billion People Can Help Sustain Nine Million Other Species on Earth" at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 6 in Stipes Hall, room 121. He will then deliver "How Camouflage Hides Animals While Revealing Mysteries of Climate Change" at noon Friday, April 7 in Waggoner Hall, room 378, as the keynote presentation of the annual Biological Sciences Student Research Symposium.

Both lectures are open free to the public.

Even though human activities threaten many non-human species, Mills argues that biological collapse is not inevitable. He will also discuss a variety of human actions that increase the chances that species will evolve to cope with a human-modified world.

During his research symposium lecture, Mills will provide a more detailed description of his own interdisciplinary research on coat color changes in snowshoe hares. His work uses field ecology, mathematical climate modeling and molecular genetics to understand how climate change will affect wildlife.

Mills is the associate vice president of research for global change and sustainability at the University of Montana in Missoula, MT. He has authored more than 100 publications and the widely used textbook, "Conservation of Wildlife Populations." He was the 2009 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow for his work building wildlife biology expertise in Bhutan. He has testified before Congress on the use of DNA to study endangered wildlife and served as co-author on the North America section of the Nobel Prize winning 2007 report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The Roger and Jean Morrow Distinguished Lecture is funded through an endowment in honor of Roger M. Morrow, the first head of the WIU Department of Physics, and his wife, Jean, who was one of the University's first female faculty members in the WIU Department of Biological Sciences.

For more information, contact WIU Biological Sciences Professor Shawn Meagher at SA-Meagher1@wiu.edu.

Posted By: University Communications (U-Communications@wiu.edu)
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