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compatriots in graduate school, such as Malcolm McKenna and Dick Tedford. Younger colleagues that
followed him at Berkeley, who were there when he returned in 1967, included Dave Webb, Dave Whistler,
John Rensberger, and Everett Lindsay. There are few colleagues in paleomammalogy who have not been influenced by his work.
Grants and fellowships
Bill’s preeminence in the field has won him many research grants and also prestigious fellowships. He
has been a visiting professor at the University of Munich and the University of Bonn; he has been an
NSF postdoctoral fellow at University College London and at the University of London; he has won a
Bill (left) and Walter Alvarez chat at the party given for them by UCMP in honor of the awards they received recently.
(photo courtesy of Mark Goodwin)
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The decorative cake made for the awards party: plastic dinosaurs are doomed by a lava flow of icing emanating from a volcano at the upper
left. (photo courtesy of Mark Goodwin)
Guggenheim Fellowship and two awards from the Humboldt Foundation in Germany, as well as an NSF mid-
career fellowship; and he served as a Miller Institute Research Professor here at Berkeley.
Service
Bill has devoted his life to service to the University and to his profession. In addition to his curatorial
duties, Bill was Chair of the Paleontology Department and Director of the Museum from 1987 to 1989. He
served as the President of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology from 1992 to 1994 and as Past President
from 1994 to 1996; these years witnessed a challenging transition as the Society grew and faced problems
of burgeoning growth as well as issues related to the commercial sale of vertebrate fossils. Bill also served
as Trustee of the California Academy of Sciences from 1988 to 1997, during which time he was Vice President
for two years and President for four years, all the while keeping up a full-time load of research and
teaching at Berkeley—plus a well-funded program of fieldwork and student support. We’re still not sure
how he survived the 1990s, but we’re hoping that he’ll fund his retirement by bottling and selling whatever
got him through it.
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