Current ISBE Newsletter - Autumn 2008 Vol 20(2)
Obituary: Paul Ward
With great sadness I must report the premature death from cancer of our friend and colleague Paul Ward, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the Zoological Museum of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, on 19 April 2008, aged 49.
Paul Ward was born in Scotland on 25 October 1958. He studied for his BSc at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and moved on to pursue a PhD with Geoff Parker at the University of Liverpool, England, completed in 1984. After post-doctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology in Starnberg, Germany, the University of Liverpool, and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, he became Assistant Professor of Zoology at the University of Zurich. He stayed there ever since, moving up the ranks, to finally assume the position of director of the Zoological Museum in 2002.
Paul Ward is probably best known for his early work on sexual and natural selection in Gammarus and Sepsid flies, but particularly for his later work on sperm competition and cryptic female choice mechanisms in the yellow dung fly. Paul was a long-standing member of ISBE and the main organizer of the memorable millennium 8th Behavioral Ecology Congress in Zurich in 2000. Paul also served as the Secretary of the ISBE from 2002 to 2006.
As a final tribute to Paul’s scientific legacy, we have organized a symposium on sexual selection, sperm competition and cryptic female choice that took place in Zurich on 25 October 2008, the day of his 50th birthday.
We all miss Paul, as a colleague and a friend.
Wolf Blanckenhorn
Zoologisches Museum, Zurich
October 2008
Back to Society News | Current Issue Index