SFA’s Department of Biology to host J.H. Burr Distinguished Lecture Series

NACOGDOCHES, Texas –– Stephen F. Austin State University’s Department of Biology will host the J.H. Burr Distinguished Lecture Series at 5 p.m. March 19 in Kennedy Auditorium.

The featured speaker will be Dr. Lee Fitzgerald ’78, SFA alumnus, professor at Texas A&M University and curator of the herpetology collection at the Biodiversity Research and Teaching Collections at the university.

“We are delighted to have Dr. Fitzgerald back on the SFA campus to be the featured speaker for the J.H. Burr Distinguished Lecture Series,” said Dr. Carmen Montaña-Schalk, associate professor of biology. “Dr. Fitzgerald’s research focuses on the ecology, evolution and conservation of amphibians and reptiles in Latin America and the southwestern United States.”

Fitzgerald will present “Coming of Age with Conservation Biology.” This presentation traces the field’s development from its foundations in the early 1980s through pioneering work in biodiversity inventories and sustainable-use programs, while examining the hard lessons learned about the limits of conservation at scale. It concludes with a forward-looking vision for multidisciplinary collaboration and locally grounded solutions to advance conservation science.

The J.H. Burr Distinguished Lecture Series is endowed in honor of J.H. Burr Jr., who taught at SFA from 1951 to 1986. Burr earned his doctoral degree from Rice University and served as the histologist for SFA’s Department of Biology.

For more information about SFA’s Department of Biology, visit sfasu.edu/biology.