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Hal Whitehead, Killam Professor of Biology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, cruises the oceans for weeks at a time to collect data for his studies of sperm and northern bottlenose whales. His research focuses on their behavior, principally social organization and the transmission of culture among these cetaceans, as well as on their ecology and population biology. He tracks them by listening to their sounds in habitats from the Indian Ocean to the North Atlantic to the South Pacific, including the equatorial waters near the Galápagos Islands, the archipelago off the coast of Ecuador visited by Charles Darwin. Dr. Whitehead has developed sophisticated analytical tools for studying whales that are used by marine biologists around the world. Educated at the Uppingham School and at Christ’s College, Cambridge, he studied pure mathematics and received a diploma in mathematical statistics before switching to zoology and earning a Ph.D. at Cambridge in 1981. He spent three years as a post-doctoral research fellow and then as a research associate at the Newfoundland Institute for Cold Ocean Science at Memorial University of Newfoundland before joining the faculty as adjunct assistant professor. Accepting an Izzak Walton Killam research fellowship, he moved on to Dalhousie University where he became a NSERC (National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) University Research Fellow and an assistant research professor in 1986. Named a professor of biology in 1996, he assumed his present chair in 2000. Dr. Whitehead is the recipient of a COSEWIC (Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada) Service Award and has won prizes for his science articles for the general public and for children. He has been a Hefner Lecturer at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and a Super Speaker at the Duke University Marine Laboratory in Beaufort, North Carolina. The author of some 120 papers published in scientific journals and fifteen essays in collected volumes, he is the co-editor (with Janet Mann, Richard C. Connor, and Peter L. Tyack) of Cetacean Societies: Field Studies of Whales and Dolphins (2000) and the author of Voyage to the Whales (1989) and, most recently, Sperm Whales: Social Evolution in the Ocean, which was published last year by the University of Chicago Press.
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