At an age when most students are finishing college and considering graduate school, Alex Pyron will receive his Ph.D. in Biology. In addition, the 22-year-old Georgia native, whose field is evolutionary biology, has already been working as an NSF Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at SUNY–Stony Brook (he qualified for his Ph.D. last fall when he was 21) and recently accepted a faculty position at George Washington University.
How did this happen so fast?
“I went to public school in Georgia until fourth grade,” says Pyron, “but I didn’t find it very engaging.” His mother decided to home-school him for two years, after which Pyron took the ACT and scored well enough to enter Georgia’s Piedmont College at the age of 12, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in biology at 16.
Looking at prospective graduate schools, Pyron contacted Professor Frank Burbrink of the Graduate Center’s Ph.D. Program in Biology, whose lab is based at the College of Staten Island and whose research focuses on the phylogenetics of snakes, reptiles, and amphibians.
Burbrink’s lab was a perfect fit. “I was extremely excited to be accepted at CUNY, as I knew that was where I really wanted to do my graduate work,” Pyron says. So a 17-year-old from rural Georgia headed to New York City to study his passion, snakes.
“I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know I wanted to work with snakes,” he says.
In research for his thesis, Systematics and Historical Biogeography of the Lampropeltinine Snakes, Pyron found that the biodiversity of these types of snakes is greater in temperate North America than in the tropics—the opposite of which is true for most animals. He has also studied the evolutionary patterns of non-venomous snakes that mimic venomous snakes.
Next January, Pyron will become the Robert F. Griggs Assistant Professor of Biology at George Washington University, which runs a graduate program in his field of systematics and evolution jointly with the Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian. There, he will be on the fast track to becoming one of the nation’s leading herpetologists, and perhaps the youngest.
Original Source: http://www.gc.cuny.edu/press_information/current_releases/2010/May/commencement.htm
For more information contact David Manning at dmanning@gc.cuny.edu
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This post was written by Global Village School on June 29, 2010
