Dr. Tim Patterson is Professor of Geology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He received both a B.Sc. in Biology (1980) and a B.A. in Geology (1983) from Dalhousie University, Halifax, N.S. and a Ph.D. in Geology from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1986 with Dr. Helen Tappan Loeblich and late Dr. Alfred R. Loeblich. After brief stints at the University of Southern California and University of California at Berkeley he joined Carleton University in 1988. He is Principal Investigator for two major research initiatives: a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Strategic Project studying the effect of past climate change (on scales varying from seasonal to millennia) on fish populations that are important to the North American west coast fishing industry; and a Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences that is investigating climate cyclicity as recorded in the varved sediments preserved in anoxic fjords along the coast of British Columbia.

Other areas of research interest include hind casting the impact of land use changes in the environmentally sensitive Oak Ridges Moraine, north of Toronto using thecamoebians, identification of climate cycles and trends in laminated sediments of meromictic lakes in Eastern Canada, and the determination of whether the methods of non-linear dynamics are applicable in the study of evolutionary phenomena.

His personal interests include fast computers, fast vans (he is a family man, after all), Liz and the kids, fishing, deer hunting, gardening, home repair, all things Star Trek, and most recently cleaning ancient Roman coins for fun and profit – all in all the perfect demographic.

The accompanying digitally altered photograph does not look all that much like professor Patterson as he usually has unkempt long hair and a beard.