Professor Awarded Membership in International Society
 
Dr. Wes Tunnell has been awarded membership as a National Fellow in the Explorers Club, an international society founded 1904 to promote scientific exploration and field research.

The Explorers Club has 32 chapters worldwide, with more than 3,000 members from every continent and more than 60 countries. As a National Fellow of the Explorers Club he becomes part of a unique society that’s included such internationally-acclaimed explorers and conservationists as Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Byrd, Jane Goodall, Edmund Hilary, Sylvia Earle and Thor Heyerdahl.

Tunnell, associate director of the Harte Institute for Gulf of Mexico Research, professor of biology and director of the University’s Center for Coastal Studies, is a broadly trained marine biologist/ecologist with a particular interest in field studies on coral reefs and coastal areas of the Gulf of Mexico. Although his current focus is on biodiversity of the Gulf of Mexico, he has studied and published on coral reef ecology, coastal ecology, oil spill impacts, brachiopods, colonial water birds, and vertebrate fossils from the seabed.

Tunnell obtained his Ph.D in biology from Texas A&M University in 1974. That same year, he became an assistant professor of biology at A&M-Corpus Christi (then Texas A&I at Corpus Christi) and was instrumental in starting the biology master’s of science program that emphasizes research in field biology and coastal studies. In 1984, Tunnell he was one of the founding members of the University’s first research center, the Center for Coastal Studies. Tunnell was named a Fellow in the Texas Academy of Sciences in 1981 and, four years later, was selected as the University’s first Fulbright Fellow.