About Terry McGlynn
I’m Terry McGlynn. I’m Professor of Biology at Cal State Dominguez Hills, and also a Research Associate in the Entomology Department at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
My research nowadays involves infrared thermal biology, and I'm still involved in earlier work about the experimental natural history of ants, urban ecology, community science, and tropical rainforests. My lab website is leaflitter.org if you want to know more about that stuff. Also my lab site has a link to a version of my CV, so you can see I'm a legit scientist who has published a bunch, been funded a bunch, mentored a bunch of students, gotten awards, and all that stuff. And here are responses to some frequently asked questions.
I live in Pasadena, in the foothills below the San Gabriel National Monument. My spouse works for Jet Propulsion Laboratory, running informal education programs for JPL and NASA. Her work seems to match my job in terms of its joys and challenges. We have one kid, who is no longer a kid, and I respect their privacy.
At CSU Dominguez Hills, we have over ten thousand students, about 5% of them are white, and about 70% of are first-generation college students. They nearly all are commuters, and many are working 15-40 hours per week. We’re officially MSI status (HSI, AANAPISI and maybe one or two other ways). We’re also classified by the Carnegie folks as an “Opportunity University,” which makes working there pretty cool. I'm telling you this stuff about CSUDH because it informs a lot of what you might read on this site. I've been there for almost two decades (!) so obviously there have been a lot of formative experiences.
Most academics have walked along wandering and frequently bifurcating paths. I’d like to think that my particular route has helped me get some insights into how different kinds of institutions work. I’ve seen big and small, wealthy and not, urban and rural, diverse and homogeneous. I’ve been involved in non-profit education and outreach orgs, spent plenty of time with biological collections, and have been in partnerships with state and federal agencies. After 30 years of maintaining a research program at La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica, I've wound things down there to focus on my newer stuff which is mostly collections-based. I still get down there once in a while because, well, if you've been there then you know why I keep going back.
I was an undergrad at Occidental College. After a year of not wandering much, I did my PhD work at the University of Colorado in the department formerly known as Environmental, Population and Organismic Biology, in the lab of the remarkable Mike Breed. I did a brief postdoc at the University of Houston, before taking a visiting position at Gettysburg College. I then taught for seven years at the University of San Diego, a tuition-dependent private Catholic school. I’ve been at Dominguez Hills since 2007. I became the Director of Undergraduate Research at CSUDH in 2018. For a three year period after that, I served the California State University as Director of the California Desert Studies Center. I am currently serving as the Chair of the Academic Senate for CSUDH. Considering I started down my career path with a long-term plan for teaching and running a smaller-scale undergraduate research lab, this is not the journey I had in mind! Nevertheless, it’s been a lovely I’m excited to see where it will go next.
Where to find me in the socials?
Here I am on BlueSky as hormiga.
Here I am on LinkedIn as terry.mcglynn.
There also is a bluesky/fediverse account for Science For Everyone at the very simple handle of @hormiga.scienceforeveryone.science.ap.brid.gy.
Here I am on Facebook as terry.mcglynn but am basically there to stay in vague touch with people in my neighborhood and also colleagues who are far flung around the world. I deleted my instagram, and I’m no longer on twitter as @hormiga, and threads was useless too, same for mastodon.
[version 06 August 2025]