CORNELL UNIVERSITYEvolutionary biologist Rick Harrison, a Cornell scientist famous for his early work on hybrid zones and later research on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), died unexpectedly earlier this month (April 12) while visiting Lizard Island, Australia. He was 70.
Amy McCune, chair of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell, told the Cornell Chronicle that Harrison had been a “pillar” in the department over the last 40 years. “He was a superb scholar and scientist,” she said. “He was both critical and open-minded, kind and compassionate, thoughtful and caring, and a much revered mentor and friend to many of us, faculty and students alike.”
After earning a bachelor’s from Harvard in 1967 and a PhD from Cornell in 1977, Harrison spent nine years on the faculty at Yale, before returning to Cornell in 1986 to what was then called the section of ecology and systematics (now the department of ecology and evolutionary biology).
His contributions throughout the 1980s to research on hybrid zones—regions in which ...
