ABSTRACT
My career was hugely inuenced by Donn Rosen and his close colleagues, Colin Patterson and Gary Nelson. Like Lynne Parenti, I was in the PhD program at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) during the height of the cladistics revolution in systematic biology. Rosen and Nelson were my graduate co-advisors. It was an exciting time to be in systematic biology, and New York was where it was all happening in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Donn was the paternal gure in the Ichthyology Department of the AMNH to both students and staff. He died far too young, but he left an impressive legacy of students who took curatorial positions in major natural history museums across the world.
