I (Floyd Reed) just learned that Rick Harrison passed away in April while on vacation in Australia. I came across a nice memorial article to him in the latest edition of Molecular Ecology. I did my first laboratory rotation in his lab when I first arrived in graduate school in the fall of 1996. After years of only reading and thinking about PCR I was able to set up my first PCR reaction in his lab in an RFLP project with gypsy moth (Lymantria dispar) samples from around the world (to try to identify the source of introduced populations). Later he became a member of my Ph.D. committee (for my Ecology and Evolution minor, the program I was in had Ph.D. minors). I still remember some of the other people in the lab; Steve Bogdanowicz (who first taught me a lot of molecular genetics lab skills), Chris Willett who is now at UNC Chapel Hill, Matt Hahn was an undergrad doing an experiment on copepods from lake sediments, and Mohamed Noor a postdoc in Chip Aquadro's lab collaborated with Rick on a cricket experiment. There were a few other people around the lab but I can't quite remember there names just now. One postdoc was working on generating a recombinant genetic map in beetles and later moved to Maryland, another grad student was working on a flying fish phylogeny... And of course there was the ram's skull with giant horns over the door to the darkroom where gels were visualized with UV.

Rick was a cheerful, intelligent man that was sometimes intimidating (to a new graduate student) but I did value and enjoy talking with him. He was very available, had a sense of humor (once he brought in some coprolites and asked the students to identify them), and seemed to have an endless supply of energy. He was interested in a wide range of subjects---I remember one conversation in particular about how broad versus how focused one should be on research subjects in the development of a career.

He is the second member of my graduate committee to pass away. Ken Kennedy (Physical Anthropology minor) passed away in 2014. It is hard to think that they are no longer with us.