Glued to a television screen watching the
adventures of Jacques Cousteau may have been the spark that captured a young
Brian Smith's desire to travel and explore. It could have been the science, but
more likely it was the adventures and exotic places that he watched flashing
across the glowing screen that guided him to a career in biology.
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"No one could
distract me from watching a Jacques Cousteau program. Not even a family
activity could pull me away." Brian Smith |
 The television show certainly had a lasting effect. Many years later
professor Smith still feels the need to travel and as far as adventure,
well, how about jumping out of a plane at 13,000 feet? As an accomplished
skydiver who will soon reach 2,000 jumps, he knows how to keep excitement in
his life. If jumping out of planes was not enough, in 2006 he base
jumped off an 800 foot cliff in Norway. Was the walk down going to take too
long?
Following along the academic path
Even though he has traveled the world and literally jumped off the Earth,
his academic path was more traditional. Science remained a focus in high
school and while attending college. The only thing that Smith needed to
figure out was what type of scientist he was going to be.
| At first he thought he would be
involved with biology and philosophy and then he shifted to
behavioral ecology. In fact, he spent many years studying the
behavior of bees and how they interacted with their nest mates.
While studying bee behavior Smith realized he really needed to know
how the brain works and so he shifted to his current scientific
interest - neuroscience. What's next? Smith says the idea
of moving into the area of human brain imaging seems interesting...
to bee sure he is likely to morph into some other science
field before he retires... that is if he ever retires. |
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Brian Smith with a few
thousand
of his close bee friends. |
One degree of separation?
If you have ever played Six Degrees of Separation, a game that challenges
you to find links between two people in six connections or less, you might
be impressed by the separation that professor Smith has with his childhood
idol. Though he never met Jacques Cousteau, his wife, Lori, actually worked for the
marine biologist and world explorer. So with only one connection he can be linked to the adventurer that he once watched on the family television while dreaming
of being an adventurer and scientist himself. |
