Leonard A. Smock named director of VCU’s Inger and Walter Rice Center for Environmental Life Sciences

By Anne Buckley

Virginia Commonwealth University has named the chair of its biology department as the first director of the Inger and Walter Rice Center for Environmental Life Sciences, VCU’s environmental field station on the James River.

Leonard A. Smock, chair of VCU’s Department of Biology since 1990, will oversee all day-to-day operations and coordinate all activities and programs associated with the Rice Center, an ecologically rich, 343-acre parcel of land that VCU Life Sciences uses for research, education and outreach activities. He retains his position as chair of the Department of Biology.

“Dr. Smock’s role as director will be key to the Rice Center as it enters its transition into a premiere research facility, beginning with the construction of a research pier set for this fall,” said Thomas F. Huff, vice provost for VCU Life Sciences. “His expertise in aquatic ecology and water pollution biology will certainly be an asset to the center.”

Smock, who joined VCU in 1979, has conducted extensive research, funded primarily by the National Science Foundation and the National Park Service, on the ecology of the streams, rivers, and floodplains of Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina. Included among his research are analyses of the biological structure and food webs of the communities that inhabit these environments, the productivity of aquatic ecosystems and the connections between rivers and their floodplains. He is the principal investigator of an NSF grant to develop Rice as a biological field station focused on large rivers.

He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Illinois and his doctoral degree from the University of North Carolina. Smock has served as president of the North American Benthological Society, the foremost scientific society focused on the ecology and assessment of streams and rivers. He recently published an extensive review on rivers of the southeastern United States.

In addition, he is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a council member for the American Institute of Biological Sciences.

The Rice Center was created from a donation of land in 2000 from Mrs. Inger Rice. It is located on the north bank of the James River, southeast of Richmond between Berkeley and Shirley plantations. Located on one of the country’s most ecologically and culturally significant rivers, the Rice Center also is the headquarters for the Virginia Rivers Initiative.