Biography
Elsberry was born in Lakeland, Florida. He was brought up in the Evangelical United Brethren church, which merged with the Methodists in 1968 to form the United Methodist Church. He attended a public elementary school, an evangelical junior high, and a Catholic high school. He worked on a survey crew for a paving contractor during summers in high school and part of college. He received a National Merit Scholarship and earned a B.S.(Bachelor) in zoology from the University of Florida in 1982. During that period, he worked as a staff photographer for the Independent Florida Alligator newspaper.
After graduating, he worked for Media Image Photography in Gainesville, Florida. In 1983, he became a lab technologist for the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Florida. In 1984, he married Diane J. Blackwood. In 1985, he became a biologist in the Department of Physiological Sciences of the College of Veterinary Medicine there, working with Professor Richard H. Lambertsen on the histology, physiology, and epidemiology of fin whales.
He then entered a program in artificial intelligence, obtaining an M.S.C.S. in computer science from the University of Texas at Arlington in 1989. Following graduation, he was employed by General Dynamics Data Systems Division, programming fire-control computers for F-16 fighters. In 1991, he became a research scientist at the Battelle Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, working on a mapping system for the U.S. Air Force.
In 1993, he began his doctoral studies in wildlife and fisheries sciences at Texas A&M University with Professor William E. Evans as his major advisor. He collaborated with the U. S. Navy Marine Mammal Program in 1995 to investigate marine mammal hearing at depth. He periodically travelled to San Diego to continue collaboration on temporary threshold shift in marine mammals, until he was employed as a Behavioral Research Programmer for Science Applications International Corporation. He collaborated with Ted W. Cranford on a study of dolphin biosonar sound production in 1999. In 2001, he was awarded the Society for Marine Mammalogy's Fred Fairfield Award for Innovation in Marine Mammal Research. He completed his Ph.D. in 2003.
Elsberry is now a visiting researcher at Michigan State University.
Read more about this topic: Wesley R. Elsberry
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)