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Using Animals That Sleep All Winter to Study Why People Get Fat Greg Florant was born in New York City, NY. When he was 6 years old, his family moved to Palo Alto, California. That gave him the chance to spend most of his free-time watching birds and mammals in the hills near where he lived. He also spent a lot of time fishing. Greg always loved watching animals. He wanted to know how they lived in such different places (like hills, desert, and ocean). When he was 14, Greg got the chance to work at the Palo Alto Jr. Museum. He took care of the eagles, hawks, falcons and birds like that. He ended up liking those kinds of birds so well that he started to learn everything he could about them. He even learned how to train some of the hawks. Greg got to study many of the animals while he was working for the museum and that’s when he knew he wanted to study science. Getting His Feet Wet in ScienceGreg wanted to study science because it was something that was based on facts. That meant once you got an answer to a question, no one could tell you that you were wrong. And it was more fun than math. Greg also liked doing experiments and testing his ideas. He had great science teachers in high school. He always knew he would go to college. He was even president of the Future Teacher’s Club at his high school. The best part of high school was when Greg got to work with a college biology teacher in a lab at the University of California at Berkeley. There Greg studied bird eggs and helped to do some of the research that showed that the chemicals people use to kill bugs were making the shells of bird eggs thinner. This was really true for the peregrine falcon. When he was in 12th grade, he even got his name on an article in a science magazine from that lab work. One summer when he was in the library at the college, Greg met a chemistry teacher, who told him about Cornell University in New York. Greg decided that was where he would go to college. He moved to New York, went to Cornell, and got his degree in Biological Sciences and Physiology in 1973. What Kind of Career?In both high school and college, Greg liked best to learn about how living things worked. He wanted to know more about how people deal with our air and water and how animals live in very different places. That is what made him want to study physiology. Greg knew he wanted to be a good teacher and do good research, so he decided that he wanted to get a job at a college where he could do those things. That meant he needed to go on for more school and get a PhD degree. In trying to decide where to go to school, it was another teacher he knew who told him about Stanford University in California. So Greg moved back to California and went to school there. He got his PhD degree from Stanford in 1978. It took a lot of hard work on his part without giving up to make it through school. Greg was lucky to have his family and many of his teachers there to help him too. Dr. Florant currently is teaching and doing research in the Biology Department at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado. In his job he gets to teach both students who are just starting college and those who are working on a PhD degree, He also does research with both kinds of students to make sure they have the same chance to learn physiology as he did. He also goes to schools in his area to talk to students in all grades about science. Studying How Animals Get FatDr. Florant studies how animals use the energy their body makes. He looks at how animals get fat and use that fat as energy to live under harsh conditions, like in winter when food is not readily available and animals either have to migrate, find some food, or hibernate. Animals that hibernate under go times where their body temperature drops very close to air temperature, which can be near zero at times. But the animals re-warm from time to time but do not eat. They survive on the fat that they have stored in their body. He hopes that understanding how these animals live off their fat and don’t eat, will help us figure out why some people get fat and stay that way.
Away From Work
Dr. Florant also helps out in grade schools to teach kids about science in the city he lives in when he has time.
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