Joel Stein

Background

Although I consider myself from Chicago, my early childhood was spent in an extremely small rural town.  My two favorite things were movies and nature.  I was continually capturing and bringing home the native wildlife, observing for a few days, and then releasing. (My mother is a very patient and tolerant woman.)  When I got to college, majoring in biology seemed to make better career sense than majoring in film.  So, I wound up with a B.A. in Biology from Macalester College.

I earned an M.S. in Zoology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I studied the biophysical ecology of whiptail lizards native to Wisconsin.  Now, when one thinks of lizards, one tends to think of deserts or jungles, not Wisconsin.  However, lizards do live there, and I was interested in how.  It turns out they do so through effective time management, a skill we could all use. The lizards hibernate for up to nine months (an incredibly long period of time for a vertebrate), wake up in the warmest months of the summer, eat, mate, eat some more, and then go back to sleep.  Unfortunately my research didn?t tell me how I could live that way.  (Although, it is sort of how I spent college?)

I moved to Arizona in 1995, and I must say it is nice looking out my window in February and seeing butterflies and hummingbirds instead of grayness and three feet of snow.  (Plus, I have lizards in my very own back yard!)  Since my arrival in Arizona I have been teaching part-time at various schools within the Maricopa County Community College District, and in 2004 I began teaching full-time at SCC.  Over the years I have taught BIO 100, 102, 105, 108, 156, 160, 181, 182, 201, and 202.  (Phew!)

I like good music and bad movies; and in what little free time I have, I like to play with my daughter or sleep.  (Note: my training as a scientist allows me to be completely objective and without any sort of personal bias whatsoever when I say that my daughter is the cutest child in the world.)