Professor emeritus reaches research milestone

Biologist Dr. David Germano publishes 100th paper (and then some)

By California State University, Bakersfield

October 25^th, 2022

Emeritus biology professor Dr. David Germano published his first paper in 1981, a few years after discovering his love of field research as a graduate student at the University of Arizona. Forty years later, Dr. Germano published his 100th paper, and he’s not slowing down any time soon.

Dr. Germano, a terrestrial ecologist who started teaching at California State University, Bakersfield in 1993, has accomplished a lot since publishing “Reptile population changes with manipulation of Sonoran Desert shrub,” his first author credit based on his master’s thesis work. Shortly after publishing his milestone 100th paper last year, Dr. Germano soon published three more papers and has three currently in review for academic journals.

“I liked teaching, but being in the field and writing papers are my greatest loves,” Dr. Germano said. “It is my total body of work of which I am proud, not a particular number of publications.”

Like many scientists, Dr. Germano’s publications range from long-term studies he’s led to smaller contributions with which he’s helped others. The paper earning him his 100-publication milestone is “Decadal change in a population of Western Pond Turtles at an isolated agricultural site in the San Joaquin Valley, California, USA” in Pacific Conservation Biology. This is one of many of his papers he has published on the only native aquatic turtle in California.

Now living in Atascadero with his wife, Rhonda, Dr. Germano couldn’t be blamed for taking the chance to slow down and enjoy his hard-earned time off after retiring in 2019. But conducting research and sharing his results has always been what makes him happy, so why would he stop now when he has even more time to dig in?

“I continue to conduct field work, although not quite as much as in the past 30 years, and I am still analyzing data and writing up papers from this 30-plus years of field work,” Dr. Germano said. “It is what I love. I am thankful that the biology faculty supported me to have emeritus status, which allows me to maintain my professional CSUB address, library privileges and a CSUB website. That has been a great help.”

It is Dr. Germano’s continued work, well into his retirement, that struck his biology department colleague Dr. Brandon Pratt.

“As a colleague, I have always found Dave to be inspirational and he has uncovered the secret to success: ‘If you love what you do, then it is not work,’” Dr. Pratt said. “This is a powerful message for faculty and students. As faculty, we need inspiration at times and Dave has set a very high bar in many respects and one for some to aspire to.”

A passion for research

After earning his bachelor’s degree in biology from California State University, Northridge in 1976, Dr. Germano began the graduate program in Arizona, studying wildlife ecology. That is where his love for research began, and the experience would be a formative one for him.

“I knew I had found what I really wanted to do as I conducted field work on many species of reptiles, mammals and birds to see how they responded to vegetation manipulation,” Dr. Germano said. “This was so much better than being an undergraduate with endless tests and papers to write that weren’t based on field research.”

Dr. Germano’s first two publications were based on his thesis, “Response of selected wildlife to mesquite removal in desert grassland.” His first paper, published in the Great Basin Naturalist, was followed by his second two years later, “Response of selected wildlife to mesquite removal in desert grassland” in the Journal of Range Management.

Though his passion was sparked, Dr. Germano had more pressing concerns when he returned to Southern California following grad school: his wife was pregnant, and he would need to support his family. First taking a tree-trimming job for seven months, Dr. Germano was able to find work in his field at an environmental company in Santa Barbara. He missed doing research, though, so when he was laid off several years later, he was in a position to make a big change.

“In the fall of 1982, I went to a section meeting of The Wildlife Society in Yuma, Arizona, where master’s students talked about their research, as I had done several years before presenting my graduate work,” Dr. Germano recalled.

“That was it. I felt this great desire to get my Ph.D. so I could at least work on one more research project. By this time, we had three children, and my wife agreed to my request to return to graduate school – what a saint!”

From there, Dr. Germano earned his Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico, where he worked on North American tortoise life histories for his dissertation and on box turtles at a site south of Albuquerque, where he could take his children, including a fourth born in 1985. Publications number three and four would follow, in 1986 and 1988.

The Germano family ended up in Bakersfield in 1989, when Dr. Germano heard from a UNM alumnus about an open job as a field research biologist for a project on the Elkhorn Plain in San Luis Obispo County. There, he worked on two endangered species: blunt-nosed leopard lizards and giant kangaroo rats. “Right up my alley,” Dr. Germano noted, explaining that he had trapped rodents previously while working at the environmental company.

Sharing the joy

New to the area, Dr. Germano also reached out to CSUB to inquire about teaching in the biology department. It would be a few years (and another five publications) later before the university would take him up on the offer, but just before the winter 1993 quarter, Dr. Germano was asked to teach an anatomy lab. By that fall, he was made a full-time lecturer; in 2000, he became an associate professor; and in 2004, he made professor.

Research might have been Dr. Germano’s first love, but he found he enjoyed working with students too, especially when he had the chance to get them out of the classroom. For several of his undergraduate courses, part of the curriculum was field work, where students would help with his research.

“I wanted them to experience the joys of working with animals in a scientific setting,” Dr. Germano said. “I thought this would be especially good for students whose main interests were medicine or micro work, who otherwise would not be exposed to field work.”

Part of this has included helping graduate students write up their research results for publication in peer-reviewed journals themselves. Most recently, his graduate student Nicole Deatherage was the lead author of Dr. Germano’s 99th publication credit, for a paper she wrote on the San Joaquin kit fox.

Like Deatherage, all of Dr. Germano’s graduate students were required to include at least one chapter in their thesis in manuscript form to be submitted to a journal. Dr. Germano is proud that all his graduate students published at least one paper from their work.

“This is what it means to be a scientist,” he said.

Dr. Germano was also able to hire students to help with a 10-year study that culminated in his paper, “Effects of grazing and invasive grasses on desert vertebrates in California,” published in 2012 in the Journal of Wildlife Management. The project included studying animals like blunt-nosed leopard lizards, short-nosed kangaroo rats and San Joaquin antelope squirrels, among others.

“Of all the publications I have had published, I am especially proud of the works that represented long-term field work because this is how you can better understand how organisms survive in nature and the effects that the environment has on them,” he said.

Other long-term research projects include a 23-year study on desert box turtles in the Chihuahuan Desert in New Mexico, an 11-year study on western pond turtles in the San Joaquin Desert and a 24-year study on rodent community dynamics in the San Joaquin Desert. Each of these projects involved multiple visits to their locations over the years.

Looking back on his career in research both as a CSUB professor and as a wildlife consultant, Dr. Germano is proud of what he has accomplished and grateful for the people who have helped along the way.

“My passion for research runs deep because with a few exceptions, I have done most of my research for no compensation, including the 24-year rodent study,” Dr. Germano said. “I was lucky enough that there are many study sites for species I wanted to work on within 100 miles of Bakersfield, so I was able to conduct much field work even in spring quarters (semesters later on) while I taught. I was greatly aided by department chairs who allowed me to teach later in the day.”