N. Dean Pentcheff 
Department of Bological Sciences
University of South Carolina 
Columbia, SC  29208
803-777-3068
dean2@boil.sc.edu

Dean grew up in suburban New York, which gives little obvious justification for his childhood interest in marine biology.  By the time he was in high school, he spent time at the Bermuda Biological Station as a volunteer, which confirmed his interest. Majoring in Zoology at Duke University, he fell into a fascination with physical biology: the relationship between organisms and the physical forces in their environment. After graduating, he heeded the call of the West Coast and spent a couple of years working for biologists at the University of Washington in Seattle, doing computer support for physiologists and cell biologists. Moving on to graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, he worked on the interaction between flow, feeding dynamics, and animal shape in barnacles at the Friday Harbor Laboratories in Washington State.  From there he moved to the University of South Carolina, where he has worked on how environmental fluid flow influences blue crabs' ability to find food by smell. During that time, he performed two missions at NURC in Florida, investigating how spiny lobsters navigate using flow and magnetic cues, as well as aspects of their olfactory biology.