Peter Beerli

About

When I grew up in Switzerland, I did not even dream of becoming a researcher. I liked to go to biology classes in the Swiss equivalent of high school, but thought of becoming maybe a science teacher or a lab technician. After passing the entry exam to the teaching college, my goal was to teach K-12, but it became clear now that I wanted to go to the university to study biology. My university studies were focused on amphibians/reptiles and computers, which led to leading an amphibian inventory in the Canton of Thurgau, writing computer programs for the Bank Credit Suisse, and running my own ecological consulting company with a friend. In 1994, I quit all that and became a postdoc with Joe Felsenstein in Seattle, developing coalescence-based inference software Migrate. In 2003, I became an assistant professor at Florida State University; my appointment moved from Biology to the Department of Scientific Computing in 2008, and I am still there, now chair of the department, and still working on the same software I started in 1994. My biggest complaint about Florida is that it is so flat – although Tallahassee is considered hilly, I like hiking and wildlife – I am happy to show you pictures of alligators, anhingas, southern toads, cottonmouths, and the like; I also like Swiss and Mediterranean cooking, and I spent time catching frogs in Greece and Turkey and sampling their cuisine extensively.