Professor of Music Composition - Ellen Taaffe Zwilich

In 1983, she became the first woman ever to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music.

Ask John Updike (who's won it twice) or Toni Morrison (who won the Pulitzer five years before she was awarded the Nobel).

But the honors didn't stop there for Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, still widely regarded as one of America's top composers.

After receiving BA and MA degrees in music composition from FSU-and a doctorate from the Juilliard School-Zwilich was asked to join the American Symphony Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski. She has since been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. And she holds the first Composer's Chair in the history of Carnegie Hall.

Despite the accolades collected throughout a career that has seen Zwilich produce in all musical media except opera, the composer values the grassroots projects that draw people to music in the first place.

Since being named to the Florida State music faculty in 2000 as an Eppes Professor, Zwilich has helped bring several projects to fruition. “We now have a composer-in-residence position at Leon High School,” Zwilich said. “It reminds students that all music is written by somebody, and a lot of us are still alive and doing it.”

On a campus visit in April, Zwilich, who splits her time between New York City and Tallahassee, attended several campus concerts where her work was being featured. Even for a composer of her stature, Zwilich says that audience reaction is vital to refining one's craft. “This is the way we learn as composers, by hearing our work in public,” she said. -P.A.S.

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Francis Eppes Professor of Music, is widely considered to be one of America's leading composers. An FSU alum, in 1983 Zwilich became the first woman ever to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music. Today, her works are commissioned and played regularly by the leading orchestras and ensembles throughout the world

Professor of Biological Science Joseph Travis

If Joe Travis isn't in his office, there's a good chance that he's gone fishin'.

Travis, Lawton Professor of Biological Science, has a keen interest in ecological genetics, the study of how selection (remember Darwin?) molds the phenotypic and genetic variation within and among populations of the same species.

Though he's worked with various animals and plants in the past, one particular species of fish-the least killifish, Heterandria Formosa (Poeciliidae)-has caught Travis' attention. Despite its size (at one inch, it's one of the smallest fish species in the United States), the live-bearing native of Florida's waters is a perfect candidate for studying how intrinsic (genetic) traits determine the number of fish that survive in the wild.

“My interest in ecological genetics arose as an attempt to study experimental evolution in the field,” Travis said. “I take genetically based variation among individual animals and plants and look at how natural selection actually works to make some variations more successful than others.”

One of the things that intrigues Travis is why some groups of fish sometimes exhibit large fluctuations in population. The traditional ecological explanation has been that such variation is mainly due to extrinsic (environmental) factors, such as predators and climate. Travis believes that's only part of the story. He's found evidence that there's sometimes a strong genetic component to a fish's survivability as well, one that depends upon how well the fish adapts to population density.

“The implication is that harvesting fish (commercially or recreationally) with different evolutionary histories could have a very different set of consequences that we wouldn't have predicted merely from the ecology,” Travis said. “Once again, we see evolution sticking its fingers into all kind of things.” -P.A.S.

Joseph Travis is a Robert O. Lawton Professor of Biological Science. A trained zoologist (Ph.D. Duke), Travis is a nationally acclaimed ecological geneticist with a lifelong passion for finding and understanding the fundamental processes of natural selection.