Patricia J. DeCoursey (28 December 1932 to 1 January 2022).

Abstract

Patricia DeCoursey was a pioneer in many ways. She was a research scientist and a professor at a time when few women held such jobs. For many years, she was a single mother (a widow) and was able to raise her family in a beautiful home. In her research, she helped to define a key function, the phase response curve (PRC) to light (DeCoursey, 1960a, 1960b). Her behavioral studies were meticulous and wonderfully detailed. She worked with others to publish what remains our core chronobiology textbook (Dunlap et al., 2004). In her later career, she conducted some of our field’s most impactful “clocks in the wild” studies (DeCoursey, 2014). Pat’s career as a Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of South Carolina included both laboratory and field studies. She studied flying squirrels and golden hamsters, and in her naturalistic studies, chipmunks, white-tailed antelope squirrels, and golden-mantled ground squirrels. From 2006 to 2019, Pat directed the W. Gordon Belser Arboretum, a 10-acre teaching forest for the university. Pat’s early life was unusual for several reasons. She was a triplet with an identical twin sister. Her family spent one summer camping in northern wilderness forests. When Pat was in fourth grade, she moved to Washington, DC, but she maintained a love of the wilderness. In high school in New York City, she completed a census of all the songbirds in a forest in Long Island, winning finalist status in the 1950 Westinghouse Science Talent Search. She attended Cornell University for her undergraduate degree in zoology and then received her PhD in zoology and biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She conducted postdoctoral research for 2 years at the Max-Planck Institute in Erling-Andechs, Germany, with Jurgen Aschoff. She even served as one of the early subjects of a “bunker” experiment, living in temporal isolation for 28 days. Her enthusiasm for science is nicely reflected in the text of a letter she wrote to her sister Cynthia at the time: