Harry W. Greene

professor, director graduate studies, Cornell

Harry Greene's research concerns the behavior, ecology, evolution, and conservation biology of vertebrates. He focuses on how morphology and behavior interact in the origins of evolutionary novelties, and on the reasons for geographic variation in the structure of ecological communities; he seek to understand those topics within an historical evolutionary context, and work primarily with lizards and snakes. Within that evolutionary and ecological framework, he gathers information on morphology and natural history from museum specimens (e.g., stomach contents), and he uses radiotelemetry to assemble behavioral inventories for free-living animals . Greene's research strategy is to accumulate data on several species at a site, sometimes for several years. From 1982 to 1992 he worked in Costa Rica and is preparing results of those studies for publication. In 1993 he studied Amazonian snakes in Brazil with local collaborators, and in 1997 he spent a month in northern Vietnam.