Charles Fisher is a Professor of Biology and Assistant Department Head For Graduate Affairs at Penn State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1985.
Fisher says his greatest personal involvement is currently in the studies of the physiology and ecology of the symbiont-containing fauna, in situ characterizations of their growth rates and microhabitats, and investigations of nutritional interactions among the many animals which inhabit or visit the vents and seeps he studies.
He oversees the projects of the graduate and undergraduate students working in his lab and gets real pleasure from the students who take our research "one step further."
In addition to the excitement of generating new ideas and proving or disproving old ones, Fisher enjoys conceiving and producing new tools and techniques for deep-sea research and then diving to the ocean floor to use them to increase understanding of the chemoautotrophic communities of the deep-sea.
