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| Ron with Rocky, the California sea lion. |
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Ron is a Marine Biologist
Emeritus and Adjunct Professor of Ocean Sciences at the University of
California at Santa Cruz and Professor Emeritus at California State University
at Hayward. He was educated at Brooklyn College and then Florida State
University, where he was mentored by Winthrop Kellogg and introduced to the
study of chimpanzees and dolphins. Ron took his first research position at the
original Yerkes Laboratory of Primate Behavior in Orange Park, Florida, where
he investigated the cognitive and social behavior of chimpanzees, gibbons, and
monkeys. In 1963, he moved to the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in order to
develop the first laboratory in North America primarily devoted to the study of
the behavior and sensory physiology of pinnipeds. At SRI, Ron helped to debunk
the notion that pinnipeds echolocated like dolphins and bats, and embarked on a
research program dealing with vision and hearing in pinnipeds. Ron and his sea
lions relocated to the Ecological Field Station at California State University
at Hayward in 1971, where Ron served as a professor Psychology and Biology and
he and his sea lions began working on an ambitious research program involving a
gestural artificial sign language. In 1985, Ron made his last move, and settled
his program at the University of California's Long Marine Laboratory. At LML,
which is located in Santa Cruz, Schusterman continues to explore the sensory
systems, perception, cognition, and communication of marine mammals in lab and
field studies.
Ron is a founding member of the Society for Marine
Mammalogy and a fellow of the Animal Behavior Society, Acoustical Society of
America, the American Psychological Association, and the American Association
for the Advancement of Science. In addition to the time he spends at LML, Ron
regularly spends time writing and teaching at other institutions - most
recently at Columbia University, the Aquarium for Wildlife Conservation in New
York, and the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Altenberg, Austria.
Ron is
extremely proud of the students he has been associated with over the past forty
years and still actively mentors a small group of graduate students at the
University of California, Santa Cruz.
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