CHAPEL HILL - Nelson Hairston of Carolina Meadows, Chapel Hill, died
at age 90 in his sleep on July 31, 2008. He was an internationally
renowned ecologist, known for his research on the structure of the
communities of organisms in nature and as an early contributor to the
field of ecological parasitology. Hairston was born on 16 October
1917 and grew up on his family's Cooleemee Plantation near
Mocksville, North Carolina. His early schooling was at Virginia
Episcopal School and he obtained BS and MS degrees in Zoology from
the University of North Carolina. His PhD studies at Northwestern
University, under the advice of Orlando Park, were interrupted by the
Second World War, during which he served in the south Pacific working
on malaria transmission and treatment. He returned to graduate study
at the end of the war and completed his dissertation in 1949 studying
the distribution of salamander species in the North Carolina
Appalachian Mountains.
Hairston married Martha Turner Patton of Swananoa, North Carolina, on
19 August 1942, and after completing his PhD the two of them moved to
Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he accepted a faculty position in Zoology
at the University of Michigan. He served on the faculty at UM for 27
years, helping to establish there one of the premier programs in the
nation in ecology. During this period, he also served for a decade as
Director of UM's Museum of Zoology, and for extended periods as a
consultant for the United Nations World Health Organization as an
expert on schistosomiasis in the Philippines, Switzerland, Iraq,
Kenya, Egypt, Western Samoa and Rhodesia.
In 1974, Hairston accepted a Kenan professorship in the Department of
Biology at the University of North Carolina where he served for 12
years teaching a very popular course in Vertebrate Zoology. Near the
end of his career, he was given the Eminent Ecologist Award of the
Ecological Society of America and was elected a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He retired in 1986 and soon
thereafter wrote three books, one of which, "Ecological Experiments",
was translated into several languages.
Nelson Hairston is survived by his wife, Martha of Carolina Meadows,
Chapel Hill; daughter, Margaret Hairston Searcy of Miami, Florida;
son, Nelson G. Hairston, Jr., of Trumansburg, New York; and five
grandchildren. His daughter, Martha Hairston Weston, died five years
ago. Friends interested in making a donation in his memory are asked
to contribute to the Graduate Student Fund of the Department of
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology of the University of Michigan, or to
the Department of Biology at the University of North Carolina, two
departments to which he dedicated his career and remained deeply loyal.
A funeral service will be held at Chapel of the Cross, Chapel Hill,
N.C. at 2 p.m. Friday, August 15, 2008.
