J. A. Moore
| John Alexander Moore | |
|---|---|
| Born |
June 27, 1915 Charles Town, West Virginia |
| Died | May 26, 2002 (aged 86) Riverside, California |
| Education |
B.S Columbia College (1936)
|
| Title |
President, Society for the Study of Evolution (1963)
|
| Spouse(s) | Betty Clark |
| Children | Sally Moore Gall |
| Awards |
Fellow, Guggenheim Foundation (1959)
|
| Signature | |
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|
John Alexander Moore (June 27, 1915 – May 26, 2002) was an American zoology professor emeritus.
Moore was born to Louise Hammond Blume and George Douglas Moore, a lawyer, in Charles Town, West Virginia in 1915. Four years later his parents divorced and Moore traveled with his mother first to Carson City, Nevada and Oakland, California until she remarried and moved the family to Markham, Virginia two years after her divorce. Although the schools he attended at the time were not the best, Moore's location in the Blue Ridge Mountains kindled his interest in birds from a young age; Moore published his first academic article in Auk at age 15. In the early 1930s Moore's mother divorced again and took the family to Washington D.C. and then to New York City. Moore finished his last two years of high school at Haaren High School. He also volunteered at the American Museum of Natural History. Despite his humble background he was accepted to Columbia College as an undergraduate after a strong interview. While there, he married fellow embryology graduate student Betty Clark in 1938. Both had studied under Lester Barth. It was likely Moore's suggestion in the 1930s that influenced Lester Sharp and Franz Shrader to coin the term , which refers to a genetic structure key to chromosome congression during metazoan mitosis.
From 1939 to 1941 Moore tutored biology at Brooklyn College and from 1941 to 1943 he taught biology at Queens College. In 1943 Moore was hired by Barnard College to teach zoology. He was promoted to full professor in 1950 and was made the chair of the zoology department at Columbia University. Moore received a Fulbright Scholarship in 1952; he and his wife spent a year in Australia using cross-fertilization to study frog speciation. The resulting monograph, published in 1961, described 94 frog species. An illustration of one of the frogs discussed in Moore's monograph, the Corroboree frog, was featured on an Australian postage stamp. No longer a department chair, Moore continued teaching at Columbia until 1968 when he was hired by University of California, Riverside (UCR). Although Moore reached mandatory retirement age in 1982, UCR allowed Moore to keep his office and continue to teach until his death in 2002.
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