Jacalyn Giacalone Willis, Ph.D.

When Jackie first visited Panama as a student in August 1974, she was so enchanted by the forests and the people that she decided to find a way to come back again as soon as possible. She returned that December and has been returning almost every year since.

Growing up in Brooklyn and going to school in Manhattan at Hunter College High School meant that she grew up with a good education but little exposure to wildlife and forests. Her uncle, Dr. Charles H. Kelley, had encouraged her to learn everything, and awakened her interests in science and the arts. However, it was at Queens College, that her mentor, Dr. Max K. Hecht, taught her how to enter the realm of frogs and thus opened a whole new world for her. In college, she started to travel and found wild and beautiful places that she loved and developed very intense interests in ecology and animal behavior.

She has spent most of her life either studying animals in their natural settings or teaching about them. She studies mammal population fluctuations in the rainforests of Panama in a long-term (15-year) study, and has led an Earthwatch Expedition to study mountain squirrels in Costa Rican cloud forest. Her partner in these adventures since 1980 has been her husband, Gregory E. Willis. He taught her fly fishing, which also offers ways to understand ecosystems. Their interests in wildlife have led them to various habitats in Guatemala, Belize, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, and Tahiti, as well Hawaii, Alaska, and most of the mainland U.S.

;She was a graduate student at the City University of New York where she earned a doctorate in Biology, with a thesis on social behavior of flying squirrels. She found a job, home, and friends at Upsala College, where she taught for 18 years and was chair of the biology department until Upsala closed in 1995. Now she directs the Great Ideas in Science Consortium at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

Great Ideas in Science (GIS) is funded at $2.8 million by the National Science Foundation, as well as by the Edison Fund, the Turrell Fund, the EXXON Corporation, and the New Jersey Statewide Systemic Initiative. GIS is a project to help K-8 teachers teach science as effectively and enthusiastically as possible. The project is focused on the urban districts of Jersey City and East Orange, with additional partner schools in other parts of New Jersey. One strategy of this project is to link teachers and their classes to the community of research scientists. The Rainforest Connection is one way to, as her friend Dr. Bert Leigh says, "put a human face on science." The Rainforest Connection expands the classroom and links children's experiences to those of scientists. Teachers in GIS institutes learn the use of outdoor experiences to foster questioning skills in children. Jackie says, "Children require the stimulation of natural habitats for the full development of their curiosity. City living makes the job of teacher harder than it ought to be."

Her special interests are in birding, drawing, hiking, and videotaping wildlife. Students often ask her what her favorite animal is, and she is likely to say, after a long pause, "I think frogs,...or maybe squirrels...but then, I do like cats, and, of course moose, and then there are hummingbirds,...oh, I don't know, it could be deermice...or owls..." and so on.