Michael Bell

About

I was born in 1947 and grew up in Los Angeles. I started college at UC, San Diego, where I was fortunate to work with Dick Rosenblatt as an undergraduate. I earned my university degrees at UCLA and erned my Ph.D. under Evorett C. Olson, a paleontologist. I started my only professional job in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at Stony Brook University in 1978, when the department was excellent. I was hired as an associate professor and slowly progressed to the rank of full professor in 1999.

As a child, I was interested in the local lizards, but as their abundance declined and a highway cut near my house exposed a rich deposit of diverse, marine fish fossils, my interests shifted to fish osteology and paleontology. My dissertation research mostly concerned variation of fossil and extant Threespine Stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus), and research on this widespread fish species has grown dramatically since my research started in the 1970s.

I did several papers on California stickleback populations, and my focus shifted to Alaskan populations in the 1980s because they had evolved some highly divergent phenotypes. Throughout my career, I studied fossil stickleback, which first attracted me to the species. My research on Alaskan Threespine Stickleback extended my work on stickleback pelvic girdle reduction and attracted the interest of developmental molecular geneticists. Their genetic insights into pelvic reduction, which I continued to study in extant Alaskan and fossil Nevadan stickleback, led to production of an early genome sequence and growing interest in Threespine Stickleback. My work on Alaskan stickleback attracted several other investigators to initiate research using phenotypically diverse Cook Inlet populations, and the book I edited with the late Susan A. Foster in 1994, The Evolutionary Biology of the Threespine Stickleback, made the large literature on stickleback behavior, ecology and evolution accessible to diverse biologists. I was fortunate to select a species with excellent potential for research in evolutionary biology.

I retired from Stony Brook University in 2019. By then, my department had become mediocre, and it and the university had become a hostile workplace. While I was fighting to prevent Stony Brook University from firing me and preparing my stickleback collections for deposit in the California Academy of Sciences and the University of California Museum of Paleontology, Stony Brook University tried and failed to fire me.

In 2016, I was appointed to the unpaid position of Research Associate in the University of California Museum of Paleontology (on the Berkeley campus), which is my primary affiliation now. I continue to work with collaborators on the molecular genetics and genomics of extant stickleback and on the paleoecology and evolution of fossil stickleback. My current research is active and focuses on evolutionary time series.