Lawrence B. Slobodkin

Lawrence Basil Slobodkin (June 22, 1928 – September 12, 2009) was an American ecologist and Professor Emeritus at the Department of Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook University, State University of New York. He was one of the leading pioneers of modern ecology. His innovative thinking and research, provocative teaching, and visionary leadership helped transform ecology into a modern science, with deep links to evolution.

Biography

Slobodkin was born in 1928 in the Bronx, son of Louis Slobodkin and Florence (Gersh) Slobodkin. He was strongly influenced by the artistic, intellectual, cultural, and political milieu in which he developed; his mother was a writer and his father a noted sculptor who later became a well-known illustrator and writer who received the distinguished Caldecott Award for his watercolor illustrations of the children's book, Many Moons as well as biographies of the legendary revolutionaries Garibaldi and Lenin. While absorbing the lessons of art and literature, Slobodkin developed a guiding interest in biology, which he pursued first at Bethany College in West Virginia, and later under G. Evelyn Hutchinson at Yale University, where he received his doctorate in 1951 at the age of 23.

After completing his Ph.D., Slobodkin worked for two years for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, where he developed a novel, theoretically informed hypothesis for the origin of red tides. He then joined the faculty of the University of Michigan in the Department of Zoology in 1953. In 1968 he moved to the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Among his many other activities, Slobodkin held a key post as instructor and director of a marine ecology course, taught at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole for many years in the 1960s, that served as a training ground for prominent ecologists.