In Memoriam: Frank Price
Frank at the Terak (the blurry pictures in the background are his wife, Sue Ann Miller (also a biologist at Hamilton College), his daughter Alta Price, and his son, Scott Miller Price).
On 25 May 2022 BioQUEST lost one of its founding members, Frank E. Price. He was one of the twelve brave software developers who met in the summer of 1986 who embraced our 3P’s philosophy and accepted the challenge of the Annenberg Fund of the Corporation of Public Broadcasting to sustain our work for at least nine years. He was the primary developer of two of the first eighteen modules in the BioQUEST Library: EVOLVE and Data Collection and Organization. Later Frank worked closely with Sam Donovan, Jim Stewart, and me in developing BIRDD: Beagle Investigation Returns with Darwinian Data on the Galapagos Finches. Frank not only moved us from a spreadsheet version to a data-based management system, but he personally traveled to the California Academy of Sciences and entered data on all the taxidermic specimens in the famous collection of David Lack and supervised his Hamilton College students to make panoramic movies of sites Darwin visited on the Galapagos Islands.
Collage of images from BIRDD 2.0 published on a CD in the Academic Press version of the BioQUEST Library. Frank built interfaces for dealing with numerous types of data: morphological, acoustic, video, taxonomic, geographic, sequence, and weather as well as historical data on different names of the islands.
At numerous BioQUEST workshops, Frank not only helped colleagues with software development, he was also a leader in the movement for developing quantitative reasoning in biology. In particular, he had expertise with the highly visual statistical package JMP. His guidance helped faculty and students in implementing it in numerous biology classrooms across the nation. Subsequently, numerous students developed beautiful analyses of multivariate data in three dimensional displays. Much of his work should be considered as laying a foundation for the current attention to data science education with its attention to volume, variety, veracity, value, and, velocity.
Frank collaborated with the first Director of the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium Patti Soderberg in publishing about educating students in population genetics well beyond the usual focus on Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. This work has been much cited.
Frank graduated from the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., earned a B.A. at Hamilton College and a Ph.D. in environmental biology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He was a biology professor at Oberlin College, Kirkland College, Hamilton College and Utica College. He also was a Director of Academic Computing at Hamilton College.
When I first met Frank in 1982 at a Society for the Study of Evolution meeting, he was programming population genetics software on a Terak (which I doubt many of you have heard of - see image above). Later he converted EVOLVE to an Apple IIe which he published with COMPress and then, with Virginia Vaughan’s help, moved it to a Macintosh for publication in the BioQUEST Library.
Dipper-watching
Counter to our image of Frank sitting at a computer, Frank had a wide variety of interests and skills. He was an evolutionary biologist whose research involved lots of field work on birds. He was a skilled rock climber and photographer. Frank loved being outdoors. He walked Rocky Mountain streams in Colorado wearing hip waders and rock climbing gear to study the American dipper (Cinclus mexicanus unicolor) for research. Later he enjoyed seeing other species of dippers in Scotland and Japan. Frank summited most of the Colorado Fourteeners, many of the Adirondack 46 in winter and summer, and the highest ground of most states and hundreds of counties around the USA. His visits to National Parks included hikes beyond viewpoints. In his later years hiking to fire lookout tower sites and waterfalls were as enjoyable as higher summits. Frank repeated hikes to many Colorado and Adirondack summits with his children and walked village sidewalks and local country roads regularly until very recently.
Frank taught his sister, Mary V. Price, how to do rock climbing and also helped inspire her later career in field-based evolutionary ecology. Dr. Mary Price is now professor emerita at the University of California Riverside.
Frank declined a memorial service, but friends can consider memorial contributions to Neuroendocrine Tumor Research Foundation (<netrf.org>), The Nature Conservancy, or a charity of their choice.
Personally, I miss this good friend who was so fundamental in helping build the BioQUEST community. I cannot stress how important he was in personally pushing me to develop as an educator and an evolutionary biologist as well as valuing family first and foremost.
Sincerely,
John R. Jungck