Menzmer, Austin J. PhD

Biography

I always knew that I wanted to go into education, but I chose biology on a whim when deciding on a college major at Southern Adventist University in Tennessee - the allure of field trips to Great Smoky Mountains and Mammoth Cave National Parks was too much to resist! The trips – where my explorations ranged from hiking 300 feet under the ground to over 6,000 feet above sea level – lived up to the hype. I particularly enjoyed a week-long camping trip to the Smokies for an upper-division botany course, which planted the seed in my mind that “stopping to smell the roses” could be a legitimate and enjoyable career. I graduated from Southern with a B.S. in Biology, cum laude in 2017.

I commenced my graduate education at Andrews University in Michigan, where I studied the seasonal diet variation of a local thirteen-lined ground squirrel colony. Concurrently, I served as the Head Teaching Assistant for Anatomy and Physiology labs. I graduated from Andrews with an M.S. in Biology in 2019.

With a desire to increase my skills in teaching and experience in botanical fieldwork, I next moved to the University of Georgia for doctoral studies. During my time there, I spent four summers traipsing through the woods at three different sites across the Southeast, studying how windstorms and salvage logging impact the diversity and composition of herbaceous species. Concurrently, I served as the Teaching Assistant for a variety of lower- and upper-division botany courses. My favorite days were when I could lead my own students on field trips to local botanical gardens, herbaria, and greenhouses! I graduated from the University of Georgia with a Ph.D. in Plant Biology in 2024.

I am thrilled to join the faculty at Husson University. I really connect with Husson’s vision to be a place where students succeed, experiential learning is championed and global engagement is emphasized. Biology is meant to be learned in an active, hands-on, and FUN manner where students of all abilities and backgrounds can thrive! Whether students aspire to be biologists themselves or simply need to take my classes to get to where they are going, I hope they will come away with an increased understanding, appreciation, and care for our natural world.

Because we can never have too many people caring about, in the words of Apollo astronaut Frank Borman, “the good Earth”.