Dr. Reiss grew up in southern California. As an undergraduate at U.C. Santa Cruz, he discovered his love of amphibians while flipping logs as he walked between classes. For his undergraduate thesis he spent three months in the field, surveying the herpetofauna of South Devil’s Canyon, Big Sur. A class in comparative anatomy and a graduate seminar on the then-new field of EvoDevo led him to pursue graduate work at Harvard University with the late Dr. Pere Alberch, where he focused on the evolution of amphibian skull metamorphosis. A number of his graduate years were also spent as a guest in the lab of fish paleontologist and evolutionist Dr. Amy McCune at Cornell University, where he worked in the Cornell Collections. After a brief stint teaching Human Anatomy at Ithaca College, he headed back west, doing postdoc work on the Xenopusolfactory system in the lab of Dr. Gail Burd at the University of Arizona, Tucson. Since coming to Humboldt in 1997, he and his students have continued to study amphibian metamorphosis, particularly of the olfactory system, as well as other areas of amphibian biology. In his spare time, Dr. Reiss investigates the history and philosophy of evolutionary biology; his first book (Not by Design, UC Press, 2009) explores the design argument, both pre- and post-Darwin, in light of the great comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier’s principle of the “conditions for existence.”