Blaire Van Valkenburgh

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Born and raised in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Alexandria, Va., Blaire Van Valkenburgh, now a professor in the UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB), enjoyed many field trips to the Smithsonian Institution Natural History Museum. Undoubtedly, the skeletons of dinosaurs, giant Pleistocene beavers and the massive elephant in the rotunda influenced her decision to become a vertebrate paleobiologist.

She majored in environmental science and took a variety of courses including geology, biology and astronomy. After graduating in 1970 with a bachelor of science degree and after her dinosaur T-shirt design business proved insufficient, she returned to school at Johns Hopkins University in search of a doctoral degree in paleontology.

Her graduate studies were followed by a post-doctoral position teaching human anatomy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. As a result of being surrounded by colleagues studying human evolution in distant continents, she was able to visit Africa as a field assistant on a fossil dig in western Kenya, an amazing experience that helped bring life to her studies. She returned to Africa multiple times over the next decade to study carnivore behavior and ecology.

Van Valkenburgh arrived at UCLA as an assistant professor in 1986, a bit daunted by Los Angeles, but entranced by the fact that coyotes were part of the urban fauna. She has been here ever since, even serving as EEB department chair from 1998 to 2004, during an exciting time of changes and intellectual growth among the faculty. She has been honored with the department’s Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award twice, appointed an honorary fellow of the California Academy of Sciences and is currently president-elect of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontologists.

As a teacher, she has extended her efforts beyond campus to curate an exhibit entitled “Cats! Wild to Mild” and advised on a second exhibit on man’s best friend, the dog, both with the Museum of Natural History of Los Angeles County. In addition, she has been interviewed for a number of television documentaries produced by the BBC, Discovery Channel, A&E and National Geographic. All of these activities allow her to extend her reach as a teacher to thousands of individuals beyond UCLA. She has also authored or co-authored 57 papers in the scientific literature.