Barbara (Bobbi) Peckarsky was a high school teacher in Madison, Wisconsin, from 1971-1974. During summer 1974 an aquatic ecology class taught by Drs. Stanley and Ginny Dodson at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory (RMBL) in Western Colorado was a life-changing experience. She became smitten with streams and from 1975-1979 conducted field work for her PhD both at RMBL and in central Wisconsin, earning her PhD in 1979 at University of Wisconsin, Madison, under the guidance of Stanley Dodson. Bobbi spent the next 26 years (1979-2005) as a faculty member in the Entomology Department at Cornell and became joint appointed in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. At Cornell she taught courses in Freshwater Invertebrate Biology and Stream Ecology, as well as graduate level seminars. She mentored research projects of undergraduate and graduate students, and served on the advisory committees of numerous graduate students in Entomology, EEB and NBB. At RMBL she has been a Senior Investigator since 1979, has mentored hundreds of student research projects, taught courses in Environmental Impact Studies and Stream Ecology, participated in educational and outreach programs for students of all ages, and served as a member of the Board of Trustees.
Bobbi is currently a professor emeritus at Cornell and an honorary fellow and adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison. She “retired” officially in 2005, but has remained far from unoccupied, continuing her research as a senior investigator at RMBL. She mentors students conducting research at levels from high school to graduate school at both UW and RMBL. Her research interests include predator-prey interactions between fish, stoneflies, and mayflies; mayfly-algae interactions; and the effects of flow disturbances and climate-change-induced alterations in temperature and hydrology on invertebrates and algae in streams around RMBL. She continues to build a long-term (since 1976) dataset of invertebrates in streams protected by non-consumptive water rights obtained by RMBL in the 1970s. This dataset has become the basis for student projects and collaborations with other colleagues. Dedicating her entire research career to obtaining incremental knowledge at one specific place (“Ecology of Place”) has enabled Bobbi, her students and collaborators to implement a “follow your nose” approach, where new questions boil up out of careful observations of natural history and ecological patterns, informing experiments, and shaping our fundamental understanding of the ecology of streams.
