Thank You to a Dynamic Duo: Drs. Bill and Sheri Wischusen Set to Retirement
Like all good things, Drs. Bill and Sheri Wischusen’s time at LSU is coming to an end as they both prepare to retire at the end of this semester.
We want to thank them for the impact they have made in the LSU Department of Biological Sciences, the LSU College of Science, and LSU as a whole. While you both have made lasting legacies, your energy and presence will be missed. We wish you both the best in this new phase of life.
Join us as we reminisce with the Wischusen’s on their time at LSU and what’s next for the dynamic duo.
Tell me about yourself and your background. What drew you to this field of work – who or what was your inspiration?
Sheri: So “this field of work” has been a moving target for me. I was a biology major as an undergrad, and then got a Masters in Biochemistry. I worked in a biophysics lab at Cornell University, and then taught Chemistry at a community college in Las Vegas. When we came to LSU, I wanted to stay away from lab chemicals while our sons were little, so I jumped on an administrative position with Dr. Harold Silverman’s HHMI Undergraduate Research Program. Soon I realized I loved working with students to help them find their places in science. I’ve continued in that field my entire time at LSU.
Bill: I started in college thinking that I wanted to go into marine biology. As I completed college and went on to graduate school I expanded that to vertebrate ecology. During my time in graduate school I also taught as a lab instructor and that sparked an interest in teaching. Since then I have followed a path towards increasing involvement in teaching and then ultimately graduate student and faculty professional development.
What do you enjoy most about your work?
Sheri: Students!! I meet many of our newest students even before they begin their first semester at LSU. It is incredibly rewarding to work with them and get to know them during the week of BIOS and then keep a relationship with some of them for their whole LSU careers.
Bill: There are two things that make it easy for me to come to work everyday. The first is working with students and helping them see the connections between the material in their courses and their lives. Watching students make connections as they work with the course content is incredibly rewarding. The second is the chance to do science, to ask and then attempt to answer questions is both challenging and rewarding.
What was a turning point of defining moment in your work as a scientist?
Sheri: I was overwhelmed by the early analyses of our 2005 and 2006 BIOS student success data. We thought the boot camp would help students over the hurdle starting college but could not have imagined that they would continue to excel so much all the way through. It became apparent early on that BIOS was having a tremendous positive effect on participants.
Bill: My early research with flying lemurs was a major turning point for me as a scientist. It was the first large scale research project that I led and involved working with a little known group of mammals. As a result we had to make up almost all of the research techniques. At that point I felt that I was beginning to understand how to really do science.
How did you end up at LSU?
Sheri: I came along with Bill.
Bill: I was a lecturer at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas when I saw an advertisement for the position of Introductory Biology Program Coordinator. This position involved being responsible for all the introductory biology courses at LSU. It seemed like both an interesting challenge and a chance to have a greater impact on students.
What are some of the high points of your LSU experience?
Sheri: The best thing about being at LSU has been getting to interact with amazing people – students, faculty, staff. The College of Science has been a wonderful family, through several deans and lots of other colleagues, and I will certainly miss them. The embrace of Boot Camps by the university community in general for many years was very rewarding.
Bill: LSU has been a great place for me to work. I feel very fortunate that for all of the large projects I have had the freedom to do what I thought needed to be done for that specific project. I have had great support at either the departmental, college or university level to pursue projects that were of interest to me. In the end the BIOS program has been an amazing highlight. The impact that the program has had on students is far beyond anything that we imagined when we first envisioned the program.
BIOS is a nationally recognized and widely replicated program.
What sparked the idea for this program?
Sheri: We recognized the need but couldn’t find any programs to emulate… so we decided to make it up ourselves. We took the best practices from summer-long pre-freshman programs and first-semester freshman seminars and crunched them into a weeklong “boot camp”. The LSU hierarchy couldn’t offer us funding but offered not to stand in our way. We made it work, and it took off beyond our wildest imaginations.
Bill: As the Coordinator of the Introductory Biology program at LSU and as someone who was teaching BIOL 1201 in the fall semester I was acutely aware of the problem that many of our students were not successful in BIOL 1201. In many cases it was clear that this was not due to a lack of knowledge or intellect on their part, but rather that they didn’t understand what they need to do to be successful. They had no way to know how different college would be compared to high school. Sheri and I had many conversations about this over the dinner table and slowly we began to think that letting them see college courses were really going to be like ahead of time might be one key to their success.
How many other institutions have a BIOS or BIOS like program?
We have data that show 29 colleges/universities have done BIOS programs over the years. Most of them contacted us as they were beginning, but several read our journal articles or heard us at conferences and used our information to begin their own boot camps. Some highlights include: U. of Alabama, Ole Miss, U Kentucky, Missouri, U South Carolina, UT Austin, U Wisconsin, and of course the University of Nevada at Reno, where former LSU College of Science Dean and UNR provost Kevin Carman, began NevadaFIT for the entire university.
Will you continue to lead the BIOS program at LSU and/or at other colleges/universities?
We have done consulting for several years and will keep that up. The folks who will take over LSU’s BIOS Program are incredibly capable scientists and educators who are very passionate about BIOS and CHEMIS, so these programs are in very good hands.
What's next for the Wischusens?
Who knows!!! Once COVID is behind all of us, we hope to do a lot of traveling. We are both anxious for a bit of beach time. Our families live all over, but mostly in Atlanta and Huntsville, AL. We haven’t seen our 2 ½ year old granddaughter in a year so that’s trip #1.