Gail S. Tucker, Ph.D.
Project Coordinator
E-Mail for Gail: gtucgrif@earthlink.net
Gail is from the Bronx in New York City, where she survived 12
years of parochial school education. The discipline and nurturing she
received--from talented women teachers, capable in science--made her
see any goal as possible, regardless of her sex. She was "a city
slicker" whose earliest memories include the T. Rex
at the Museum of Natural History and Hayden Planetarium
and voracious reading cover-to-cover of National Geographic. At the family cottage in
Connecticut she fished bluegill and yellow perch, caught
lightning bugs, stalked wild foxes, made pinebough bows and arrows,
and identified plants in the Connecticut woods she roamed. For
children who enjoy such things, she recommmends
Dietrich Knickerbocker's New York by
Washington Irving. The illuminated pages of a special edition of that
book showed every imaginable plant and animal common to temperate
forests. This was her first exposure to species diversity,
identification and classification--which encouraged her abiding
interest in nature. Each summer at her grandparents' farm in New
Hampshire she chopped wood for cooking and heating stoves, picked
beans for supper, collected eggs and milked cows and took in the
hayin'. She rescued the requisite injured squirrels and birds, watched
insect pupae and learned to catch fish the "Indian" way--standing VERY
still near the shore while wiggling her fingers in the water to
attract fish (well it worked at least once!); she did high school
science projects on animal behavior (her pet cat may have been
permanently traumatized by her study on maze learning), on firefly
behavior--her observations were later referred to in an article on
Firefly cannibalism; on bioluminescence for which she was awarded a
four year college scholarship in New York. The plan was to attend
college pre-med and then veterinary school. She was accepted
provisionally at K. State School of Veterinary Medicine. Required to
attend graduate school for one year, she chose the University of
Kansas where she participated in verbal jousting with other graduate
students; the challenging qualifying examinations for the doctoral
program; chose her doctoral advisor and saw the exciting prospects
provided by advanced courses in embryology. Vet school had been a good
idea, but she discovered that she was allergic to furbearers, and this
proved to be the deciding factor in her pursuit of a Ph.D. in Cell and
Developmental Biology. While at KU she assisted in a team-taught
mammalian physiology course under the direction of Dr. Frederick
Samson, whose SciTalk, "Antioxidants and Aging" is archived here.
Always exciting and enthusiastic in the classroom he was one of her
role models as a teacher, and remains a friend and mentor today. After
completing her research at Woods Hole, she obtained her Ph.D. from KU
in 1973.
Post-doctoral appointments at Columbia and Harvard followed, and faculty
appointments at her undergraduate alma mater, at the University of Miami
(FL) and Miami-Dade Community College. Her home for the last twelve years
has been New World School of the Arts High School in Miami. New World, a
National School of Excellence, has turned out graduates who are already
achieving fame in the arts world. The special circumstances of this school
enable a teacher to teach and to try new things, to enjoy the learning
environment and to explore problems with realistic expectations that they
will be solved. Happily, many of her students have gone on to medical school
and research careers--a tribute to New World's science department faculty.
In 1994, Gail was one of the "first class" of AE Fellows--remaining active
online in the Southeastern group established at the first summit. Over the
years her students have participated in Biome Box exchanges, Telegenetics
studies, message boards, realtime online chats, Acid Rain studies and pond
pH studies. In 1995 she organized two realtime chats online (archived here
in SciTalk) with Dr. Samuel Gruber who is an internationally respected shark
scientist at the University of Miami Rosensteil School of Marine and
Atmospheric Sciences. In 1996 she was an AE Returning Fellow and later that
year she became SciTalk Coordinator. She received a Tandy Honorable Mention
in 1996 and a Tandy Fellowship in 1997, has been active on her school's
Technology and Awards Committees, sponsors two award-winning service clubs,
and has been Chairman of the Science Department there for three years. She
and her husband Bob (Griffith) share parenting of her college sophomore
stepdaughter Julie (who has recently declared her major as Genetics with a
minor in Business Administration--Genentech here she comes!) and their
ferret--Clyde; they recently went live with an online collectibles business,
and to relax enjoy South Florida's weather and its special coastal
environment.
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