About Me

Hi there, I’m glad you’re here! I hope you enjoy perusing around my site. My name is Jason and I’m an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at DePaul University in Chicago.

I wasn’t always a professor. I spent a long (long) time as a student at the University of Guelph where I completed a B.Sc. (Marine Biology) and my Ph.D. My Ph.D focused on the Regulation of Gill Sodium/Potassium ATPase During Salinity Acclimation in Salmonid Fishes. Looking back, my interest in this topic likely originated from my love of fishing as a young boy and watching nature documentaries about the amazing life cycle of salmon.

I was so impressed by their resilience, their toughness, their focus and their determination. To spend so much effort, and take such a risk to migrate from freshwater out into the open ocean, and then to turn around just a few years later to swim against the current of their native river to return to the place where they were born just to have their own babies. At the time, based on what I had seen and read, I understood this to be their final act…how tragic! (now I know not all species meet this final fate (poor Pacific Salmonids)) Imagine giving every last ounce of your being, to ensure that a new generation could…be. How could that story not turn every young person into an aspiring salmon biologist?! It doesn’t get much more interesting than that! Lucky for me there’s only a few hundred of us salmon biologists around and I was fortunate enough to get a job doing what I always loved…to ask questions about nature (not just salmon anymore).

Since the Ph.D. I went on to enjoy some fun years at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of British Columbia where I was a post-doc. Great memories!