Jackson Award

Chair

• Duane A. Schlitter (schlitterda@gmail.com)

Members

History and Mission

The Jackson Award Committee was established in 1977 to recognize members who have given long and outstanding service to the American Society of Mammalogists. The committee evaluates nominations and recommends a recipient to the Board of Directors.  The award is named in honor of Hartley H. T. Jackson, a man who was instrumental in founding ASM and who served the Society in numerous roles over many years.

2023 Hartley Jackson Award Recipient.

The 2023 recipient of the Hartley H. T. Jackson award for service to the ASM is Dr. Robert M Timm.  Robert Mark Timm was born on 28 August 1949 in Lincoln, Nebraska and grew up in the small town of Wilber, SW of Lincoln.  He got his start in biology early on. Among his early memories are watching ant lions in the yard, catching and rearing caterpillars to see what kinds of butterflies or moths would emerge, and fishing for crawdads at the local “crick.” His father taught him how to hunt and fish in an era where there was abundant wildlife. He could walk or take his bicycle to hunt or fish long before he could drive and was usually accompanied by his best friend, his dog. His mother would cook the game he brought home as long as it came into the house fully cleaned and ready to cook. Bob started working in his father’s meat market grocery store early on. One of his first jobs was assisting the butchers at area farms when they butchered livestock. He salted hides for preservation that weighed more than he did rubbing rock salt thoroughly on the flesh side. The use of salt as an antibacterial agent and to pull moisture out of skins to lock the hairs in became one of his standard techniques in preparing scientific study skins in the tropics in later years when he became a mammalogist. During his high school years, he handled many aspects of the butchering process, and an adult, he regularly assists friends when deer or chickens need to be butchered. His parents, especially his mother, showed remarkable tolerance for a wide array of pets including raccoons, turtles, salamanders, and insects. He was a good student in high school although he found his other interests far more engaging.

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In 1967, he enrolled as a zoology major at the University of Nebraska-Kearney not having any idea what he would do with the degree. He was fortunate to get hired on the first day by the mammalogist there, John Farney, to manage the dermestid beetle colony and care for the live animals in the department—jobs he held throughout his undergraduate years. He would continue to work with dermestids for the rest of his career and published papers on various aspects of their biology. The biology department had several excellent teachers that fostered and focused his education and many of the biology courses took advantage of the ready access to the nearby Platte River and Nebraska sandhills for field trips. He combined his interest in mammals and arthropods to undertake a study of the ectoparasites of meadow voles, which would eventually become two of his first scientific papers.

Elmer C. Birney had taught at Kearney for a year prior to taking a faculty position at the University of Minnesota and contacted his former colleagues looking for students for his new graduate program. Bob started in the master’s program in Department of Ecology & Behavioral Biology and Bell Museum of Natural History in 1971. He was fortunate to arrive in the Museum along with a vibrant community of new, young faculty and their active graduate students. Elmer strongly believed that students, especially students that needed direction, should do a master’s degree and Bob was anxious to expand upon his knowledge of mammals and learn the Minnesota fauna. They selected the most remote and poorly documented region of the state, the northeastern Arrowhead Country, for Bob’s master’s thesis, a “mammals of…” type project that was a format well established at Elmer’s alma mater, the University of Kansas. Bob’s thesis was published in 1975 as the “Distribution, natural history, and parasites of mammals of Cook, Minnesota.”

For his Ph.D., he transferred to the Department of Entomology, Fisheries, and Wildlife on the University of Minnesota’s St. Paul campus receiving his Ph.D. in 1979; Roger D. Price, a louse systematist, served as his primary advisor. Throughout his graduate career, he continued to work with Elmer as his editorial assistant on the Journal of Mammalogy when Elmer was the editor. Elmer’s editorial rigor and attention to detail in the Journal and with his and his student’s publications was instilled in Bob. Elmer got Bob actively involved in ASM committee work his first year of graduate study, and Bob continued that practice getting his own graduate students at the University of Kansas involved in the Society. 

The most career-changing course Bob took as a student was the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) Tropical Ecology course taught in Costa Rica. He was hooked on the tropics, and various aspects of Neotropical mammal ecology and systematics would form the basis of his research career. One of his research projects on the course was documenting that several species of bats actively modify leaves of specific plants for roost sites.  That the minute and poorly known white bat, Ectophylla alba, modified the leaves of Heliconia for roosts. Subsequently, Bob and other researchers have since documented many aspects of this tent use in bats that were previously unknown.

Bob joined the Zoology Department at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago in 1980 as the curator of mammals. This position allowed him to work with an outstanding international collection of mammals, meet scientists and students from all over the world, and the time and resources to pursue international research and education. There he and entomologist colleague Steve Ashe were able to expand upon Bob’s observations as an OTS student in Costa Rica on amblyopinine beetles and their mutualistic relationship with Neotropical rodents…and…. 

In 1986, Bob joined the University of Kansas (KU) as curator-in-charge of mammals in the Natural History Museum and as a faculty member in the Department of Systematics and Ecology.  There he was able to combine his research, teaching, and mentoring interests for both graduate and undergraduate students.  He regularly taught mammalogy, diversity of organisms-type courses, undergraduate biology, and graduate student specialty courses.  Kansas was pleased to have him teach with the OTS’s international programs and Bob coordinated the Costa Rican graduate Tropical Ecology course and a graduate course on Neotropical bats, served as resource faculty for some 27 other graduate courses, several undergraduate courses, and served as one of the faculty members when OTS was establishing a new undergraduate program in South Africa.  For OTS, he served on the Assembly of Delegates, Advisory Board for the Las Cruces Field Station, Education Committee and regularly reviewed proposals.

Bob enjoyed his teaching and mentorship roles at KU and was awarded the University-wide Kansas Provost’s Award for Leadership in International Education (2004), College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Graduate Mentor Award (2007), and was nominated several times by the graduating seniors in biology as their “Favorite Professor.” He served as chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary. In 2002, he was elected to rank of Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Because of Elmer Birney’s mentorship and direction, Bob continued as an active member of the ASM serving on an array of committees, in a number of editorial roles, on the Board, as Vice President (2002–2004), President-Elect (2004–2006), and President (2006–2008). In 2017, he was awarded the ASM’s Joseph Grinnell Award. He has chaired 5 committees (Archives, Editorial, Honorary Membership, Informatics, and Planning and Finance) and served on 8 others.

His research has focused on ecology, evolution, and in recent years conservation of mammals, and in host–parasite interactions. He has published more than 200 technical papers, two books, and a number of Web-based publications. Two of his publications were selected for inclusion in Discover magazine’s top science discoveries for the year

Past Awardees

Click here for past recipients of the Hartley H. T. Jackson Award.