Introduction of Armand Kuris, recipient of the 2010 Clark P. Read Mentor Award.

It is a pleasure and an honor to introduce Armand Kuris as the 2010 recipient of the Clark P. Read Mentor Award. This award honors extraordinary leadership in training young scientists and fledging budding parasitologists. It targets individuals who develop strong parasitology research and education at their institution. Armand has spent over 35 years at UC Santa Barbara passionately doing both. Armand grew up in the Bronx, New York, but cold winters and an appetite for adventure drove him south to Tulane University, where he found himself on the road in the South, seining in rivers and bayous. As an undergrad mentored by the ichthyologist Royal Suttkus he gained a deep knowledge of fish biology and contributed extensively to the fish collection at Tulane. He was exposed to a parasitology course at Tulane taught by the Panamanian parasitologist Frank Sogandares but decided that fish was where it was at. Seeking more adventure after graduating in the 1960s, he moved west to UC Berkeley, where he set out to study fish taxonomy. Nevertheless, parasitology crept back into his life, and he completed his Master’s thesis on fish myxozoans. At UC Berkeley he met Cadet Hand, an invertebrate zoologist, who became Armand’s Ph.D. advisor, mentor, and academic father. Armand developed a strong background in zoology, ecology, and evolution and fused this with his growing interest in parasitology (fostered by John Simmons). In 1968, he began to work on the ecology of parasites in shore crabs for his Ph.D. thesis, and ever since, he has been hooked. However, Armand wanted to become a ‘‘real parasitologist,’’ so the day he submitted his thesis, he treated himself to Chinese food for lunch and drove across the Bay to San Francisco, where he started his postdoc at the UCSF Medical Center working on schistosomiasis with Don Heynemen and Lie Kian-Joe. He rounded off his postdoctoral experience at the University of Michigan discussing ecology with Steve Hubbell and David Tilman, again reinforcing his broad intellectual background. Armand’s exposure to different mentors and various disciplines undoubtedly shaped his mentoring style: pushing creative limits and encouraging ‘‘hard thinking’’ while never micromanaging. After short stints as an assistant professor at the University of Florida and University of North Carolina, he again headed west, where he joined the faculty at UC Santa Barbara in 1975 and never left. At UCSB, Armand has passionately mentored multiple graduate students and has exposed many undergraduates to parasitology (of whom many have gone on to study parasitology in graduate school). He has mentored 17 Ph.D. students, 10 Master’s students, and 10 postdocs. Armand has taught 10 courses at UCSB, 3 of which are parasitology courses. His introductory parasitology course is one of the most popular courses among upper division biology students. Over the years, he has taught about 7,000 students, of whom about one-third have taken his parasitology course. Armand has received several awards for teaching and research, including the Best Teacher in Sciences at UCSB in 1999, UCSB Chancellor’s Award for Undergraduate Research Mentorship in 2006, the Donald P. Abbott Memorial Lecture from Stanford University in 2009, and the Ben Gurion Medal (also awarded to Linus Pauling), and he was the 2009 ASP Eminent Parasitologist. However, it is the Clark P. Read Mentor Award that highlights his long-term commitment to his students by transmitting his passion for parasites. Since both of us graduated from UCSB a while ago, we decided to investigate if Armand’s teaching had slipped over the years. We consulted RateMyProfessors.com, which confirmed his teaching is as strong as ever, particularly in parasitology. Upon our last inquiry, while Armand is not an easy teacher (ranked 2.6/5), his overall quality, helpfulness, and clarity each raked in a whopping score of 4.5/5. Perhaps most impressively he also achieved the prized ‘‘red hot chili pepper’’ for the hotness category. Armand’s teaching is renowned at UCSB, and all the students’ comments posted on the ‘‘rate my professors’’ website provide extremely positive praise. For example, one of our favorite quotes is ‘‘Armand is one cool professor. He makes learning fun and devoted to helping students. He even made me interested in something as sicko as parasatology (sic). And he is good looking!!!’’ (sic). At UCSB, Armand served for 12 years as Associate Provost for the College of Creative Studies (CCS). This is essentially a graduate school for undergraduates, where participating in research is at the core of the undergraduate curriculum. He developed the biology major for the CCS program, which has had about 340 graduates since 1968, including a Nobelist and a MacArthur Fellow. The first day of winter quarter at UCSB begins with 60something Dr. Kuris strolling up to the front of a classroom seating 80–100 students who have all heard the rumors from their classmates telling them that they must take EEMB 111, Introduction to Parasitology. Armand pulls out an extendable car antenna (his pointer) and whaps it against the screen and pledges that all students taking this class will gain, at the very least, the ability to substantially improve their party conversation, declaring, of course, that parasites are obviously the coolest topic one can talk about. He launches into schistosomes as the first topic and uses what he calls ‘‘the hook,’’ a gripping example of the devastating disease caused by these parasites. Armand has built his parasitology course over the last 30+ years at UCSB and has taken advantage of the coastal location that offers a smorgasbord of marine hosts filled with parasites. As a five-time TA for the parasitology course, I (VJM) learned so much about observing live parasites, from turbellarians in sea cucumbers, mesozoans in octopus kidneys, monogeneans on fish gills, tapeworms in shark intestines, larval acanthocephalans in crabs, to, of course, larval trematodes in local horn snails. Armand also kept the life cycle of {These authors contributed equally to this introduction. *Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309.