Miklos Udvardy

Miklos Dezso Ferenc Udvardy de Udvard et Básth (March 23, 1919 – January 27, 1998) was a Hungarian biologist and biogeographer. He was born on March 23, 1919 in Debrecen, Hungary to the noblemen Miklos Udvardy de Udvardy et Básth and Elizabeth Komlossy de Komlos. Despite an early interest in birds, his father encouraged him to study law, but later went on to earn a doctorate in biology from the University of Debrecen in 1942. His first position was as research biologist at the Tihanyi Biological Station on Lake Balaton in western Hungary.

Udvardy left Hungary in 1948, and secured a postdoctoral fellowship at Helsinki University in Finland with Professor P. Palmgren, an ornithologist and zoologist. He met his future wife Maud Bjorklund in 1950, and moved to Uppsala in Sweden. He was Curator of Marine Invertebrates at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in for a brief time.

Miklos and Maud married in 1951 and emigrated to Canada. Udvardy arrived at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1952 and was appointed Assistant Professor in the Department of Zoology in 1953, where he lectured in comparative anatomy and ornithology until 1966. He was a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii during the 1958-1959 academic year, and was Lida Scott Brown Lecturer in Ornithology at the University of California, Los Angeles in the 1963-1964 academic year.

He served as Professor of Biological Sciences at California State University, Sacramento or CSUS from 1967 until his retirement in 1991. There he sponsored eight graduate students, and spent a year as Visiting Professor at the University of Bonn in Germany, and a year as Fulbright Lecturer at the National Autonomous University of Honduras. Udvardy served as a mentor to an impressive array of graduate students, including at UBC Peter Grant (Princeton), Jean Bedard (Universite Laval, Quebec), Spencer Sealy (University of Manitoba), Kees Vermeer (Canadian Wildlife Service), and at CSUS Raymond Pierotti (University of Kansas). He was an eclectic scholar, teaching Biogeography, Evolution, Ornithology, Speciation, among other courses at CSUS. A graduate student award at CSUS was created to honor Udvardy's memory.

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