Harmful Algal Bloom Trail Blazers
What makes a HAB society are its people. We all have our heroes. We all have had our mentors. We all end up being influenced by meeting inspiring personalities at critical times in our lives or by having read their groundbreaking papers. For many HAB scientists their backgrounds and personalities, the environments they worked in and the HAB organisms they encountered explain much of the science they did.
Inspired by the initiative by the Phycological Society of America who prepared a newsletter series on phycological “Trail Blazers”, ISSHA is preparing a series of short biographies on HAB trail blazers, covering their education, professional career, awards, key contributions, personal anecdotes, whom they mentored, and including 10 key publications. For people still alive we will get them to check the accuracy of what we write about them and seek their permission to publish their portrait photographs. The idea is to initially put up these stories on our website but by the time we have written up 40-50 people, we will consider publishing them in an ISSHA booklet, perhaps embellished by HAB conference summaries. We may even want to consider in future a collection of HAB cartoons or HAB poetry. Let us know if you are willing to contribute to this initiative. I hope you will find reading these stories on the lives of our HAB heroes as stimulating as we enjoyed collating them.
