Faculty and Staff Biographies

Research Associate Susan Reigler has also served as both a Visiting and Adjunct Lecturer in Biology and in Music at IUS. She has a B.A. in Biology (University of Louisville), B.A. in Music (Indiana University) and an M.A. in Zoology (Oxford University). Her professors at Oxford included Marian Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, Martin Speight, Henry Bennett-Clark, and E. B. Ford. In the summer between her years at Oxford, she was awarded an internship in entomology at London's Natural History Museum, where she curated sawflies (Symphyta) in the Hymenoptera Section under John Quinlin.

Reigler has been the Resident Biologist at Blackacre State Nature Preserve, east of Louisville, KY, since 1985. She has supervised student research there in water quality, invasive species distribution, and surveys of biodiversity, including insects. Eight of her IUS students have received grants to conduct research at Blackacre since 2009. A writer and musician, as well as a biologist, she was an award-winning staff writer (restaurant critic, travel writer, science writer) for the Louisville Courier-Journal for 15 years. During that time she published interviews with prominent scientists including primatologist Jane Goodall (1999) and geneticist Brian Sykes (2007), as well as over 1,200 stories with her byline. She still regularly reviews science and music books for the newspaper's book page.

Her musical life consists of being a founding member of the Ars Femina Ensemble (a period instrument ensemble that performs music by Baroque and Classical women composers and whose archive is housed in the Special Collections of the IUS Library), playing solo tenor horn with the Commonwealth Brass Band, second tenor horn with the Athena Brass Band, and trumpet with the IUS Orchestra.