We Have Lost Dave MacCauley
I am sad to report that Dave McCauley, after being diagnosed with stage IV glioblastoma in 2014, died this last October. He was 65. Dave was one of the first waves of graduate students to enter the E&E Program in 1972 and received his Ph.D. degree in 1976.
Dave worked with Bob Sokal on Tribolium population dynamics, and was the last student to run the flour beetle lab. This was followed as with a postdoc with Mike Wade at the University of Chicago from 1976 to 1979, and in 1999 he moved on to the University of Virginia as a teaching postdoc. In 1980, he joined the faculty at Vanderbilt University, where he was a Professor for 35 years.
Dave's primary research interest was the demographic and genetic consequences of metapopulation structure, and this moved him along with coworkers through an eclectic set of animal and plant species. In the early 1980s, he moved from Tribolium (he developed the inevitable allergy to the flower beetle - a bottle of nose spay always at his side) to the milkweed beetle, Tetraopes, which he studied until the early 1990s. In the 1990s, he jumped largely to plants and studied the effects of population colonization and extinction on sex-ratio evolution in the genus Silene.
Much of his research was carried out during his summers at Mountain Lake Biological Station in Virginia, where he was fixture for three decades.
Dave was born in 1950 in Baltimore, or "Ballmore" as Dave would say, playing his best Baltimore accent. He graduated from the University of Maryland College Park in 1972. Dave was one of several graduate students, including me, Bruce Riska, Dave Schneider, Pat Gaffney and Chris Simon, that shared a house and graduate student angst during this early experimental period in the department and university. Over the years, Dave would regularly stop my house during his visits to Long Island and to visit his mother in New Jersey. He found the university unrecognizable from that early period. Dave still had his dry sense of humor about everything. As many knew, he was an avid fisherman and always took advantage of any opportunities in each Long Island trip, and report on his latest fishing successes. I last saw him about 15 years ago when he and Pat, met Aimee and I for dinner in Roslyn. Dave married former Stony Brook class of 1975 undergraduate, Pat LoBalbo, and is survived in Nashville by Pat and his children, Michelle and Joe.
Walt Eanes
