Quantrell Award: James Hopson

"When I first came here I was not a very good teacher -- it took me a long time to learn," said Hopson, who joined the Chicago faculty nearly 30 years ago. "But I feel I am now, and I'm glad the students think so too. I'm happier about this honor than any other I've received."

Hopson is a vertebrate paleontologist who teaches a course called Chordate Biology. He said he tries to give a sense of the huge span of vertebrate evolution and show how past history affects what we are today. "We have this heritage that extends back half a billion years," he said, "so I try to give them some appreciation of the whole panorama."

A key component of the course is the laboratory, where the students study actual specimens and do dissections of various vertebrates.

"It's very important to have a hands-on experience with real animals," Hopson said. "They're all dead and preserved, but it's less abstract than the material presented in a lecture."

In his own research, Hopson focuses on the evolutionary transition from reptiles to mammals, and primarily on the mammal-like reptiles, or synapsids, that lived from 300 million to 200 million years ago. These animals left a rich fossil record, mostly in South Africa, where Hopson travels frequently for field and museum studies.

According to Hopson, the synapsids had a less sprawling posture than reptiles, with their limbs more under their body in mammalian fashion. They were also undergoing the transition from an ectothermal, or coldblooded, reptilian metabolism to warmbloodedness -- a change, he said, that improved their aerobic capacity and endurance and made possible a switch from the short sprints of sit-and-wait hunting to the wider-ranging mode of foraging.

Hopson received his B.S. in 1957 from Yale and his Ph.D. in 1965 from Chicago. He was a curatorial associate at Yale's Peabody Museum and a research associate in geology at Yale before joining the Chicago faculty in Anatomy in 1967. He has also been a research associate at the Field Museum of Natural History since 1971.

Hopson is quick to credit others for much of his teaching success. He said he learned a great deal from teaching for many years with department colleague Eric Lombard, whom he calls a "superb teacher." He also credits his teaching assistants, a select group of graduate students. "I feel very secure about the people I've chosen," he said. "They come to me and ask to assist in the course, so I know they want to teach in the first place."

-- Bill Burton