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<\/h2>\nThe founding member and former chair of the Department of Biology at Harvey Mudd College William K.\u00a0Purves, passed away April 22 in Costa Mesa with family at his side.<\/p>\n
Purves was the Stuart Mudd Professor of Biology from 1977 to 1995. He served as chair of the department of computer science from 1985 to 1990 and of the department of biology from 1985 to 1995.<\/p>\n
He elected early retirement in 1995 after teaching introductory biology for 34 consecutive years in order to concentrate entirely on research directed at learning and scientific education. The move grew from his association with Roger Schank, first in his Artificial Intelligence Group at Yale, then in his Institute for the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University, and in his activities at Carnegie-Mellon University, Engines for Education, Socratic Arts, and Grandview School. Purves participated in the development of Schank\u2019s Virtual International Science and Technology Academy.<\/p>\n
Purves was the senior author of the first seven editions of the college textbook Life: The Science of Biology. The eighth edition was coauthored with David Sadava, Craig Heller, Gordon Orians and David M. Hillis.<\/p>\n
A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Purves served as head of the Life Sciences Group at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, and as chair of the Department of Biological Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, where he won the Harold J. Plous Award for teaching excellence.<\/p>\n
Purves was a co-founder and scientific director of The Mona Group LLC, which combined the diverse talents of its partners (pedagogy and scientific content, programming, art, animation and publishing) to design, develop, produce, manufacture and market interactive multimedia educational software products. He consulted on education and training for Motorola, Edvotek and other companies.<\/p>\n
Purves attended the California Institute of Technology, obtaining a bachelor of science degree in 1956. He continued his studies at Yale University, completing a master of science in 1957 and a doctor of philosophy in 1959 under Arthur Galston. He was a postdoctoral fellow (1959\u20131960) with the National Science Foundation at the University of T\u00fcbingen, and was a postdoctoral fellow (1960\u20131961) with the National Cancer Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. Purves served in a senior postdoctoral fellowship with the National Science Foundation at the University of London in 1967.<\/p>\n
Purves is the 1994 recipient of a Harvey Mudd Honorary Alumni Award and the 1995 Henry T. Mudd Prize, which recognizes outstanding members of the HMC community.<\/p>\n
Purves is survived by his wife, Jean, a son, David, and grandchild, James. The family requests that gifts in his honor be made to the William Purves Endowed Life Science Summer Research Fund at HMC or to Parkinson\u2019s disease research.<\/p>\n
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<\/h2>\nOn the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the Department of Biology, the College featured an interview with Bill Purves in the spring 2013 HMC Bulletin.<\/em> Here\u2019s the story.<\/p>\n When A.J. Shaka \u201980 was thinking about applying to become a Rhodes Scholar, he turned to his then teacher and mentor for advice. Bill Purves, who had taught Shaka biology and mentored him during his senior-year research project, was ready to go to bat for his student.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was very important in encouraging me to apply for the Rhodes,\u201d says Shaka, now a professor of chemistry at University of California, Irvine. \u201cHe wrote a letter for me that the Rhodes committee brought up during the interview. Whatever he said\u2014I don\u2019t know what it was\u2014it seemed pretty important to the committee.\u201d<\/p>\n Although Purves was instrumental in launching the biology program\u2014becoming its founding member and helping raise funds for the program\u2014he is perhaps best remembered as a man who loved to teach.<\/p>\n Purves introduced the Groody and used it to illustrate various biology concepts. Illustration by Dave Gonda ’79.<\/p><\/div>\n Purves\u2019 favorite memories of his early years at Harvey Mudd center on his efforts to capture his students\u2019 imagination and to illustrate concepts by novel stories. \u201cHow might I explain the direction in which an RNA molecule grows? Aha! I\u2019ll make up a story about \u2018Dimitrios the one-armed line dancer.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSome of my students, after taking the course, sort of hung out with me and talked and talked,\u201d Purves recalls. \u201cThey were all bright, these kids. They were Harvey Mudd students.\u201d<\/p>\n The deeply felt responsibility of educating brilliant, young minds guided Purves throughout his career as a scientist and educator. He was in the right place when plans for a biology department took shape in the late 1980s.<\/p>\n A plant physiologist, Purves majored in biology at Caltech before earning a master\u2019s degree and doctorate from Yale University. He taught biology, biochemistry and botany at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for 12 years, eventually becoming chair of the biology department, before taking over a group of biological sciences departments at the University of Connecticut in 1973. In 1977, he moved to HMC. When asked why the head of a group of departments at a big research university would leave for a position as the only biologist at a small engineering school, he replied that he was strongly attracted by the promise of teaching some of the best under-graduates in the world at a very \ufb01ne college.<\/p>\n He busied himself researching plant growth hormones, teach-ing biology and eventually recruiting faculty for a new biology department. Purves\u2019 \ufb01 rst new colleague, the neurobiologist T.J. Mueller, was hired in 1981. Mueller and Purves soldiered alone for most of the decade until the College decided to approve a biology department and major.<\/p>\n \u201cI felt the College really needed somebody in molecular biology,\u201d Purves says. \u201cWe hired Nancy Hamlett for that. And T.J. and I felt very strongly that we needed an evolutionary biologist\/ecologist\u2014and that was Catherine McFadden. And then I also felt a need to have somebody who you could call a cell biologist, and we hired Jim Manser. We rounded out the initial depart-ment when we hired Steve Adolph, a behavioral ecologist.\u201d<\/p>\n Purves taught several biology classes himself. \u201cHe was very approachable,\u201d Shaka says. \u201cHe had a very keen ability to sense whether or not you actually understood what it was he was teaching. He had a sixth sense about that.\u201d<\/p>\n Bill Purves and Anne Marie Stomp, then a PhD candidate from the University of Connecticut, set up and taught the \ufb01rst HMC biology laboratory.<\/p><\/div>\n Purves had \ufb01rm beliefs about how students learned and was very interested in writing a biology textbook that would support his strategy. He had known New England publisher Andy Sinauer since the early 1960s, \ufb01rst serving as a reviewer of developing textbooks. Sinauer encouraged Purves to tackle a book himself\u2014an introductory biology course meant for both biology majors and nonmajors.<\/p>\n Working alone, Purves started on the book while at the University of Connecticut, but took the work with him to his new position at Harvey Mudd College.<\/p>\n \u201cI was working at night and on campus all day and writing. One night I was in my of\ufb01ce at Harvey Mudd and a student, Mike Ross \u201986, comes through the door\u2014this was about 1 a.m. I heard this, \u2018Whoa! What a stud!\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cIt was because I type really fast,\u201d he says with a laugh. \u201cThat was how I lived in those times!\u201d<\/p>\n He eventually collaborated with a second scientist-academic to produce the \ufb01rst two editions of the book. His last edition was the eighth, by which time he had three more coauthors.<\/p>\n Purves recommended that his students use his book in his introductory class, but he didn\u2019t think it right to get royalties from them. He returned the amount of the royalty to all students who bought an unused copy of the current book.<\/p>\n Purves left HMC in 1995.<\/p>\n \u201cI think I was 61 or 60 when I retired, and I had just come out of having cancer, which is long gone,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019d loved working with the students there, and I couldn\u2019t get enough of them, but I really needed to move on.\u201d<\/p>\n He turned to his passion\u2014how students learn\u2014and helped start a company that created educational software on CD-ROMs. He also collaborated with Roger Schank, a long-time colleague, on ventures to replace current schooling with truly effective and stimulating courses.<\/p>\n The work \u201cconcerns what\u2019s wrong with teaching and learning now, and what it should be,\u201d Purves explains. \u201cAccretion of knowledge is not the point. What people should really be learning is how to reason\u2014and then using that skill.\u201d<\/p>\n Written by Shari Roan<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The founding member and former chair of the Department of Biology at Harvey Mudd College William K.\u00a0Purves, passed away April […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47,"featured_media":8481,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,11,14,20],"class_list":["post-8479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-biology","category-computer-science","category-faculty","category-in-memoriam"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8479\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}In the Beginning, There Was Bill<\/h2>\n
35 Years Ago, Bill Purves launched the HMC Biology Department<\/em><\/h3>\n
![\"a](\"https:\/\/www.hmc.edu\/about\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/05\/Full-Groody-alone-lr-300x265.png\")
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