About Terry McGlynn
version 10 Dec 2024
I’m Terry McGlynn. I’m Professor of Biology at Cal State Dominguez Hills, and also a Research Associate at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
My research involves the infrared thermal ecology, experimental natural history of ants, urban ecology, community science, and tropical rainforests. Some questions have been: Why do so many species of ants move their nests around? What allows some native species to persist in cities filled with introduced usurpers? How is it that some ant colonies allow thieves to steal food from them without putting up a fight? How is it that slight changes in light, or in trampling of the ground, can cause huge changes in ant biodiversity? How do strobe ants strobe, and why do they bother?
On my lab page are links to my CV and my Google Scholar profile, and here are responses to some frequently asked questions.
I live in Pasadena, in the foothills below the San Gabriel National Monument. I’ve written about about being an academic parent and spouse, and I continue to fret about pervasive gender inequities, so I thought the following context might be useful (even though we all should be deeply angry about gender inequities): My spouse works for Jet Propulsion Laboratory, running informal education programs for NASA. Her work seems to match my job in terms of its joys and challenges. I have one kid, who is no longer a kid, and I respect their privacy.
At CSU Dominguez Hills, we have over fifteen thousand students, about 5% of them are while, 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).
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. For over 20 years I’ve based my research program out of La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica. I get down there once in a while but now I’m focusing on collections-based work and my own community.
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, while retaining my appointment as faculty at CSUDH. Considering I started down my carer 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 journey and I’m excited to see where it will go next.
Where to find me in the socials? Gosh it’s getting complex.
Here I am on BlueSky as hormiga
Here I am on Facebook as terry.mcglynn
Here I am on LinkedIn as terry.mcglynn
and on instagram I’m terry.mcglynn
and I’m no longer on twitter as @hormiga and threads was useless too
[version 08 Aug 2023]