Dr. Stanley A. Rice

Associate Professor

Dr. Stanley Rice is a native Oklahoman who finally came back home. Born in Cushing, OK, in 1957, he moved to California with his parents in 1964 and grew up in the part of California that looks like the Midwest (the agricultural San Joaquin Valley). He always had an interest in nature and biology, and so when he went to the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1975, he majored in environmental biology. During his junior year he took plant ecology courses and a course about the plant families and communities of California, and got hooked on it. He did a summer research project in 1978, which exposed him to rattlesnakes and poison oak, and when this did not discourage him, he went ahead to graduate school at the University of Illinois in 1979.

Stan Rice stands beside the trunk of a Sequoiadendron 
giganteum, the species with the largest trees in the
world, in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California.

 

During his graduate work, he performed dozens of experiments and made hundreds of field measurements, but as usual in graduate work he used only the last two years' data in his thesis, Environmental Variability and Phenotypic Flexibility in Plants, which he completed in January 1987. He married Lee in 1984 and Anita was born in 1986. Throughout his entire graduate school career, he was a teaching assistant, then laboratory coordinator, for the general botany course at the University of Illinois, from which he learned most of his botany as well as laboratory and teaching techniques.

 His first job was as a sabbatical replacement at The King's College in Briarcliff Manor NY, which turned into a tenure track job. It was his first full-time faculty experience, and during it he taught courses he had never even taken.  Everything was easy after that. He left in 1990, moving to Huntington College in Indiana, where he continued to teach general biology, botany, ecology, and environmental science. During his last semester there, in 1993, he taught a night course, as an adjunct, for Taylor University. He then moved to Southwest State University in Marshall, Minnesota.  After five years in Minnesota, Stan and Lee decided to go back home to the south. Lee got a job as a librarian in Tulsa, and Stan began work at Southeastern in Fall 1998, where he teaches botany, plant systematics, general biology, and other courses. Through extensive travels and from having lived in so many states, Stan has acquired practical experience with the vegetation and plant species of the United States.

 For the past eleven summers, Stan has taught plant taxonomy and/or environmental science at the Wheaton College Science Station, a teaching facility in the Black Hills of South Dakota run by Wheaton College in Illinois. The classes are mostly outdoors and involve as much hiking as mental exercise.

 Stan has been active in development of botany teaching initiatives.  He publishes his own botany textbook and laboratory manual for his botany class.  He has served as program chair, and is currently secretary, for the Teaching Section of the Botanical Society of America (BSA).  He has served as chair of the Science Education section of the Oklahoma Academy of Sciences (OAS), and is chair of the Biological Sciences section of the OAS.  He has presented numerous papers and a workshop at the annual meetings of the BSA and the OAS.  Along with hundreds of other math and science educators from around the country, Stan is a member of Project Kaleidoscope, and was on the steering committee to plan the 1996 meetings.  He is the principal investigator on a grant from the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology (OCAST) that supplements the educational development of botany students through internship experiences in crop physiology research in the lab of Penelope Perkins-Veazie at the USDA South Central Agricultural Research Laboratory.

 As much as he enjoys teaching, Stan enjoys writing even more. He has a publishing agreement with John Wiley and Sons to write a general biology textbook, Biology for the New Century, scheduled for 2006 publication.  He also has a publishing agreement with Facts on File to write a brief Encyclopedia of Evolution, also due out in 2006.  He is also preparing a general-market botany book in which Oxford University Press has expressed interest.  His fiction includes an unpublished series of short stories about Charles Darwin. He also takes his camera wherever he goes and sprawls on the ground to get close-up photos of wildflowers.

Office: Biological Sciences 234 

Phone: 580-745-2688
     messages can be left

Email: srice@se.edu

Fall 2008 Course Schedule:

General Biology (BIOL 1114) TT 9:30-10:45, 11:00-12:15 in BS204
General Biology Laboratory Tues. 1-3, Wed. 1-3

Evolution (BIOL 4303) MWF 12:00-12:50 in BS 205

Senior Seminar (CONS 4981) Wed. 10:00-10:50 in BS 203


Office hours:

Mon. 10-12, 1-4, Wed. 11-12, Thurs. 1-3, Fri. 10-12

Vita

for additional information visit http://www.stanleyrice.com