Biography
Pamela Rasmussen is the daughter of Helen Rasmussen, a Seventh-Day Adventist, whose husband, Dr. Chester Murray Rasmussen, had left the family when Pamela and her sisters were young. Her interest in birds started when her mother bought her the junior edition of Oliver Austin's Birds of the World, and Pamela subsequently always chose to receive bird books as presents.
She took her M.S. in 1983 at Walla Walla University, an Adventist-affiliated university in southeast Washington, and her Ph.D. at the University of Kansas in 1990, where she studied blue-eyed shags, and was introduced to evolutionary theory, which had not been taught at her alma mater.
Rasmussen is a visiting assistant professor of zoology, and assistant museum curator of mammalogy and ornithology, at Michigan State University, having formerly been a research associate for the eminent American ornithologist S. Dillon Ripley at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. She is a member of the American Ornithologists Union (AOU) Committee on Classification and Nomenclature, a scientific associate with the bird group of the British Natural History Museum zoology section at Tring, and an associate editor of The Ibis, the scientific journal of the British Ornithologists' Union. Pamela Rasmussen is married to Dr Michael D. Gottfried, who is Curator of Paleontology, Associate Professor of Geology, and Director of the Center for Integrative Studies in General Science at MSU.
Read more about this topic: Pamela C. Rasmussen
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