Stan Braude

Professor of the Practice in Biology

“I've been going to the Thursday Seminars for probably ten years, and for many of those years it was the highlight of my summer. That was one of the only events that drew the ecology community from UMSL, Edwardsville, SLU—all of the people in the region who worked on similar questions. This was the one time we got to see each other, to hang out and talk about what we were working on. Just last month, a bunch of people from UMSL, SLU, WashU, and NGRREC put together a grant on monitoring wildlife in Forest Park. How do we all know each other? From Tyson. So I think this is a classic example of scientifically valuable social time.

Being out at Tyson this summer, you all would have had lunch together every day, and I think that's different from going to class with people every day. People feel tighter and closer with one another when we eat together. I try to create that in my classes. We have a tradition in my Wednesday-night classes that the week after you present your article, you have to bring food for everybody else.

For the last eight or nine years, we've been tapping the maple trees on campus and then boiling down all that sap into syrup for a pancake breakfast. I make a fire outside and boil the sap over it. The last couple of years, I would start at around 6:00 in the morning and invite people from the Pathfinder class around 11:00, when we would have the first batch of syrup ready.

People outside of the sciences make fun of us—we go out to socialize and all we do is talk about work. But if you love your job, what wouldn’t you want to talk about? If you're a biologist, you absolutely talk about your work at a party.”

Stan works tirelessly to get students into the outdoors and to Tyson. Learn more about his work here and see the results of his mentoring in the WashU Trees project.