Deevey, Edward S. (Edward Smith), 1914-1988

Edward S. Deevey was born in Albany, New York on December 3, 1914. He earned his Bachelor's (1934) and Ph.D. (1938) at Yale University. Deevey taught biology at the Rice Institute in Houston, Texas from 1939 to 1943. He worked as a research associate at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution until 1946 when he began teaching at Yale University. He became a full professor at Yale in 1957 and worked there until 1968. In 1968 Deevey moved to Canada and began teaching biology at Dalhousie University. During his time at Dalhousie he also was a member of the Fisheries Research Board of Canada. In 1971 Deevey left Canada for Gainesville, Florida as the Graduate Research Curator of the Florida State Museum. He continued to receive various research grants, mostly for work in Guatemala, Florida, and China. He remained with the Florida State Museum until his death in 1988.

Deevey made substantial contributions in pollen analysis, limnology, paleolimnology, marine ecology, population biology, radiocarbon dating, low-temperature geochemistry, biogeography, and paleoanthropology. He wrote his thesis on paleolimnology under G.E. Hutchinson and introduced concepts that helped develop the field into a quantitative science. He established the standard pollen stratigraphy for Eastern North America. He pollen research was extremely influential, but his largest research project was the Historical Ecology of the Maya, in which he attempted to interpret environmental consequences of human activity in a changing climate.

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