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The Biological Bulletin
On August 11, 2009, the comparative physiologist Steve Morris was struck by a van while biking on his way to his office at the University of Bristol. He succumbed to his injuries one day later at the age of 52. Steve leaves behind a wife Maria, also a biologist, and three children.
In the late 1980s Steve was a technical officer and then scientific officer with Glaxo, UK. He received a B.Sc. with honors in biology at Birkbeck College, London University, and then a Ph.D. in zoology at the University of Glasgow in 1983, working on physiological adaptations in the rockpool prawn. He did postdoctoral research in a number of places including Universität Düsseldorf (Henrich-Hertz Stiftung Fellowship and a Royal Society Fellowship), University of New South Wales (Visiting Fellow), and University of Calgary (NATO/NERC, and NSERC Fellowships). At the time of his death, Steve was a Professor of Biological Science at the University of Bristol. Prior to arriving at Bristol in 2000, he was a Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney where he served as Deputy Head and Head of the School of Biological Sciences. In 1989, the Society for Experimental Biology presented him with the President's Medal, which recognizes young scientists of outstanding merit.
Many people know Steve through the excellent meetings and trips he organized in Africa beginning in the 1990s. For many of us, these trips presented an incredible opportunity to visit a number of different parts of continental Africa and enjoy it in the context of an excellent scientific meeting.
Steve was clearly a world traveler. His research for decades has taken him to the remote outpost of Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean. He had only just returned from Christmas Island a few weeks before his death.
Steve was also a teacher. He worked tirelessly and imaginatively to provide students in his large classes with quality instruction. This carried over to the students who worked in his laboratory, where he watched over his students with great care but allowed them the freedom to make discoveries and mistakes.
The teacher in him made him an especially effective Associate Editor for The Biological Bulletin. He joined the journal in 2005 as its Europe editor, a new position for the journal. He aggressively courted scientists to send their best work to the journal and worked hard to improve manuscripts, especially to make them accessible to a general audience.
He had a passion for learning and research, and what he loved most was using new tools and methods to answer questions about how animals adapt to different environments and how environmental factors, including anthropogenic disturbances, act to limit animal distribution. His strong background in biochemistry was clearly an asset as he began in recent years to employ more biochemical and molecular tools. His work utilized largely crustacean models but also included work on fish, reptiles, and mammals.
Steve was a prolific scientist, publishing more than 100 papers. His research was well supported with grant funding, allowing him to develop broad-ranging collaborations. During this past spring, he became interested in the effects of different kinds of nanoparticles, their distribution in the environment and their fate and effects on organisms. He enjoyed learning new things about nanoparticles and brought together a number of us in the United Kingdom and the United States to think of ways their effects on whole organisms could be studied. In June 2009 he visited me in Charleston, South Carolina, where we spent a week talking, visiting with other scientists, and making future plans. But mostly we enjoyed each other's company—lots of stimulating conversation, joking, and laughing. We always laughed. This is the way I remember Steve Morris, my friend and colleague.
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