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Paul Z. Myers
This used to be a page with a lot of my work-related stuff on it. Now it is one of those personal pages - a vanity site, in which I've thrown up a
few things about myself and stuff I care about, all as a bit of egotistical self-indulgence. I'm rearranging things in a probably futile effort to impose some order on my scattered web pages, so if you came here looking for zebrafish movies and pictures, that's being relocated to
the galleries on pharyngula.org. At least some of my teaching materials will end up on http://cda.mrs.umn.edu/~myersp/.
You can move along to someplace more interesting now.
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Family
That's me. Winter is my favorite time of the year. Really.
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This is my wife, Mary. She's more of a Spring sort of person.
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Alaric is my oldest son. He attends St. Cloud State.
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Connlann is a senior in high school.
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Skatje is in ninth grade this year.
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My Dad died in 1993, and I've got
a page with a few old pictures of him.
My mother still lives near Seattle, in Auburn, and my brothers and sisters and sisters- and parents-in-law and nephews and nieces and most of my cousins and uncles and aunts all live in Washington state, so we try to get out that way at least every few years.
Home
We live in the little town of Morris,
Minnesota, and here are a few pictures of our neighborhood. This is a town of about 5000 people on the western edge of the state, roughly
equidistant from Minneapolis, Sioux Falls, SD, and Fargo, ND. We're about as far from anywhere
as you can get.
We like it, though.
It's quiet. There's no traffic to speak of (well, we do sometimes have a rush minute in the
late afternoon, when cars might back up briefly at one of the two traffic lights in town), and
you can get around to everything important by just walking. We have a good sense of small-town
community here, and it's the kind of place where you get to know all your neighbors. It's
like Lake Wobegon, only a bit less bustling.
We've led the usual peripatetic life of academics. Mary and I both grew up in the town of Kent, Washington, not far from Seattle. I was an undergraduate at DePauw University in Indiana, and the University of Washington. We both went to graduate school at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon. I did a post-doc at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, and then was on the faculty of the biology department of Temple University in Philadelphia. Now we're in Minnesota. We hope we can settle down and get a little long-term stability now in our home on the prairie.
Work
I'm a biologist. I teach at the University of Minnesota, Morris, The Best Public Liberal Arts College in the Universe. It's a good place, a small school with high standards, so the students are smart and challenging and I get to learn a lot by trying to keep up with them.
My main scientific interest is in development - the question of how an organism can assemble itself. My experimental model is the zebrafish, Danio rerio, and I'm pursuing a number of questions about development at one particularly interesting period in the early embryo, when tissues and organs are first coming together to form an integrated, functioning animal capable of simple behaviors.
My graduate and postdoctoral training was all in neurobiology, so I'm especially interested in the formation of the nervous system. I've also got an extensive background in microscopy and digital imaging, which are some of the most important tools in my work. I've become increasingly interested in evolutionary biology, which seems to be the focus of most of my reading nowadays, and is getting incorporated more and more in my teaching.
Other interests
Computers
I've been a Macintosh programmer since 1984, and until recently I spent a fair amount of my free time putting together software for image processing, laboratory automation, and statistics. I've backed off from that recently, because a) I've been trying to settle into a new job, so I don't have much free time anymore, and b) Mac OS X changes everything, and I'm going to have to start up on the low end of the learning curve once again.
I've kept my hand in mostly with web work. I've done a bit of web design and coding over the years, and am maintaining a server in my lab that lets me tinker with fun new tools like Apache & PHP & MySQL. Part of my web reorganization is porting over bits and pieces to phpWebSite and phpBB, some very nice software that I think have potential to be useful adjuncts to teaching.
Evolution
I'm a regular contributor to the usenet newsgroup, talk.origins, and one of the feedback authors on the talk.origins website. Lately, I've also been following the "intelligent design" debate at Internet Infidels
and
Talkdesign.org.
I've written a chapter in a book that intends to rebut the fatuous nonsense Jonathon Wells published in his anti-evolutionary diatribe, Icons of Evolution. A brief abstract is available online.
A few years ago, I got involved with an infamous net loon, Ed Conrad, who claims to have found human fossils in Carboniferous rocks. He visited my lab to use my equipment to look at his "fossils". They were just rocks.