Malcolm L. McCallum - Misplaced Pages

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Malcolm L. McCallum
Born	(1968-12-26) December 26, 1968 (age 56) Maywood, Illinois
Nationality	United States
Alma mater	Illinois State University Eastern Illinois University Arkansas State University
Scientific career
Fields	Biology
Institutions	Green Mountain College

Malcolm L. McCallum (born December 26, 1968 in Maywood, Illinois) is an American environmental scientist, conservationist, herpetologist, and natural historian. He is best known as the first to identify that amphibians were going extinct faster than they had during the Great Extinction at the end of the Cretaceous Period. He is also known for alerting the herpetological community that studies on the life history and ecology of amphibians and reptiles were largely getting ignored by the mainstream herpetology journals, and as a co-founder of the largest herpetology journal, Herpetological Conservation and Biology. His research has been covered by David Attenborough, Discover Magazine, and over a hundred media outlets. Several of his studies were highly influential on United Nations documents on climate change and biological diversity.

Early life

Malcolm McCallum was born in Maywood, Illinois in 1968, the son of Donald B. McCallum, a businessman, and Mary S. McCallum, a homemaker. McCallum lived his early years in New Lenox, Illinois, where he developed his interests in herpetology and biodiversity. Later, his family moved to Maryville, Illinois. His spouse is Jamie L. McCallum, and they have a son, Max, and a daughter, Alice. He is a direct paternal descendent of Daniel Craig McCallum, and to Julius Caesar on his mother's side

Education, research, teaching and service

In 1992 McCallum graduated from Illinois State University with a B.S. degree and a double major in biology and agriculture. He names Lauren Brown, Scott Sakaluk, and Dale Birkenholz as key figures who helped and encouraged him through his undergraduate studies. He briefly attended the graduate program in agribusiness at Illinois State, but discovered pretty quick that he was much more interested in the sciences and he transferred to Eastern Illinois University, where he earned the M.S. in environmental biology under Mike Goodrich. Initially, he focused his efforts on behavioral ecology, but the influence of Edward O. Moll shifted his interests to ecology and conservation. During his masters study, one of Moll's masters students turned down the opportunity to do his thesis on a large wildlife inventory project at the Savanna Army Depot in Jo Daviess County, Illinois. Upon hearing this, McCallum asked Moll if he could do the project. This study introduced him to field biology.

Although offered the opportunity to attend the Ph.D. program at Texas Tech, he returned home to assist with a family illness from 1994 - 1999. In 1997 his discovery of deformed frogs in Madison County was covered by every major media outlet in St. Louis and later appeared on 20/20. He was hired at the St. Louis Children's Aquarium as an education specialist. After only a few months the director asked him to assist in grantsmanship, and soon gave him the title of Director of Research and Grants. He was the institution's grantwriter, designed a multitude of educational programs, conducted research on the use of Bovine Somatotropin applications in aquaculture, and delivered tours and extension programming until he left to pursue his Ph.D. in 1999. He also organized the First International Symposium on the Rio Negro River, and later edited the proceedings. Through this position, McCallum met ] (The foremost expert on Arkansas herpetology), whom later became his doctoral mentor. McCallum's academic line extends back to Archie Carr.

McCallum demonstrated a high degree of productivity as a doctoral student, submitting dozens of manuscripts prior to graduation. Many of these were focused on natural history, but they also targeted mass mortality of amphibians, spatial studies of endangered amphibians, ecological immunology, and functional biology. He is the foremost expert on Blanchard's Cricket Frog (''Acris blanchardi'') and his studies on this frog included systematics, immunology, behavior, life history, and conservation needs. He earned the Ph.D. degree in Environmental Science from Arkansas State University, specializing in ecotoxicology and conservation ecology. He continued this as an Assistant Professor at Louisiana State University at Shreveport from 2003–2005. After four years in the state, he was the fourth most published herpetologist on Arkansas herpetology behind Trauth, Chistopher T. McAllister, and Mike Plummer.

He moved to Texas A&M University Texarkana in 2005 in response to exigency prepartions by Louisiana State University at Shreveport. From 2005 to 2009, he was the only fulltime biology professor on staff at the Texarkana campus. When he arrived in 2005, the program was largely in disarray. The fallout from release of the previous professor had created much student, faculty, and administrative unrest. He assessed student performance, redesigned the curriculum, organized a paid intern program, and increased the program's rigor. Student success under McCallum's leadership was the highest in the history of Texas A&M University Texarkana's biology program. It remains unmatched in percent admission to medical, dental and veterinary school, percent admission to graduate school, post-graduate employment in the life sciences, and average test scores on the Educational Testing Service's Major Field Exam in Biology. The changes he made and outcomes of those changes were presented as a case study before the Missouri Academy of Science in 2014. While at Texarkana, he also developed a new teaching method for effectively using scientific articles in discussion settings which has received a lot of attention, and was invited to publish it in the Bulletin of the Ecological Society of American.

McCallum was introduced to Fuzzy Logic during a faculty candidate's presentation. He studied fuzzy computational techniques over the next year and submitted his first manuscript using the methods, Amphibian decline or extinction? Current losses dwarf background extinction rates. At the time, no one spoke of extinction in relation to amphibian declines. His calculations demonstrated that the losses in amphibian biodiversity in recent times represented one of the most rapid losses in biodiversity ever observed. This study immediately changed the discussion of amphibian declines to a discussion of amphibian extinction. The manuscript received widespread notoriety and Discover Magazine listed it among its list of ten most important papers on the amphibian extinction issue. His use of fuzzy approaches was extended to two studies addressing climate change impacts on herpetofauna. These three articles received international attention as important subjects of the United Nations Environmental Program's Panel on the Role of Ecosystem Management in Climate Change Adaptation and Disaster Risk Eduction in 2009. He is currently among the foremost experts on applications of fuzzy approaches to life history ecology and conservation biology.

During the 2008 - 2009 academic year, the campus was informed of multiple cuts to state funding that would accumulate to over 22% by the end of the 2009-2010 academic year. He was the only untenured professors among five full-time and part-time faculty in the program after the administration misplaced his tenure portfolio prior to evaluation, and was released due to an excess of biology faculty compared to student enrollment. From 2010 to 2015 he worked as a private consultant and as a visiting faculty member for numerous different institutions including University of Missouri Kansas City, University of Illinois Springfield, and Green Mountain College. Despite this, his productivity remained unhindered. In 2013 he published the first study to demonstrate the agronomic herbicide Atrazine could alter the sexual selection process in insects. The study results have important repercussions for nonlethal effects of endocrine disruption on populations, their capacity to interfere with sexual selection, and the role of estrogen in pheromone communication among insects. Another important study released the same year addressed falling public interest in the environment. This study demonstrated that interest in the environment is falling behind other areas of concern. Ficetola responded to this article in a short commentary, suggesting that the deductions of thsi study were misconstrued. However, that response was rebutted by McCallum effectively obliterating the argument and further explaining that "Policy is dictated by proportional popularity, not absolute numbers of individuals." This article received international media attention and was prominently discussed in relation to the Secretariate on Biological Diversity's progress on achieving Aichi Biodiversity Target 1: Awareness

McCallum's portfolio of over 100 publications and citation rating places him among the most productive herpetologists in his generation.

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In 2003 McCallum was asked to edit the journal Herpetological Natural History. After examining the publication record and discussing matters with editorial staff, he decline the opportunity. Instead, he and several other scientists established the journal http://www.herpconbio.org (HCB). The journal focused on two areas of need in the herpetological community that were closely related, life history and conservation of amphibians and reptiles. McCallum was the orginal lead editor starting in 2006. He was responsible for promotions, website, manuscript layouts, formatting, and all aspects of running the journal. As the journal grew, he stepped back from many of these roles, allowing others to take over those responsibilities. The journal now has the largest editorial staff and publishes more articles and more pages of herpetological research than any other herpetological journal. It is the leading journal focused on conservation of amphibians and reptiles and has received widespread notoriety and surprising media attention. The journal received its first Impact Factor Rating from Thomson-Reuters Journal Citation Reports in 2011 and continues to maintain a rating competitive with contemporary herpetology journals. In 2013, Google Metrics listed HCB among the top 20 conservation journals on the web, and it is widely recognized as a leader in the field. 2015 will mark its 10th year of publication under the leadership of the current governing board, of which McCallum is a founding member.

References

External links

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