SUCCESS STORY | DR. WILLIAM PATTERSON A career that's down to a science

The scientific researcher's successful career has taken him all around the world.
By MARY ELLEN PELLEGRINI
VINDICATOR CORRESPONDENT
An 11th-grade science fair project that "got out of hand" launched Dr. William Patterson on a career that now entails 30 research projects over nearly 15 years on all seven continents.
"I was going to take the typical route and work in the steel mills," said Patterson. "The late Herbert Kramer, my science teacher at Girard High School, encouraged me to do something a little different."
Patterson went on to graduate from Youngstown State University with a double major in biology and chemistry. He then worked as a field geologist for the transportation department in St. Louis. A chance meeting with a science professor offered Patterson more challenging opportunities conducting research in the Bahamas and Florida Keys.
"I quit my job, took diver training, and started a master's degree in oceanography at Michigan State University. We would drive to Florida in a van, load it with samples and drive back to Ann Arbor," said Patterson who also landed a position in a museum's isotope lab there.
Climate changes in fish
A fish biologist at the museum suggested the two combine their expertise to conduct climate change work in fish. Because "marine animals are very sensitive to temperature changes," Patterson developed a technique for extracting climate data from calcium carbonate found in fish otoliths (ear bones about the size of a thumbnail with growth rings like trees).
"As far back as Aristotle, scientists knew you could tell the age of a fish by counting the rings. We're the first to get detailed chemistry," he noted.
Patterson got the isotope values of the rings of a fish captured in Lake Erie's Sandusky Bay in 1959. He calculated the air temperature those values represented and found it matched the recorded temperature for the same year.
"This excited a bunch of people that you got very precise temperature information from some hard animal parts. The really exciting part is that people have been eating fish for hundreds of thousands of years and throwing the bones on a pile," said Patterson.
Now an associate professor of geology at the University of Saskatchewan, he uses his hiatus from the classroom, about two to three months each year, to search archeological sites for those ancient bones. Patterson, who speaks Irish, Scottish, Welsh, French, German and Spanish, leads a team of graduate and post-doctoral students in explorations stretching from the spectacular scenery of Norway to the chaos and poverty of Nicaragua.
'How people lived'
"We want to know how people lived and part of how you lived is your environment, summer and winter temperatures," Patterson explained. The otolith, similar to the black box of an airplane, yields that information.
"In the Gulf Coast, we used eel earbones to determine that an extinction 34 million years ago was caused by a decrease in winter temperatures. In Sagalassos, Turkey, we're studying interactions between Turkey and the Roman Empire from 700 BC to 100 AD. In Scotland, we're looking at otoliths from the Jurassic era about 172 million years ago," he continued.
His climate change studies not only provide a window into past civilizations, they also enable the billion dollar fishing industry to identify the origins and health of their crop.
"We can take the center of the ear bone, poke it and say this fish came from Ontario, Pennsylvania or wherever," explained Patterson. This procedure eliminates the expensive tagging program hatcheries rely on.
Additionally Patterson's data helps fish producers verify how much food must be added to the lakes to farm healthy, market-size fish.
In spite of its far-reaching implications, "fish work is a minor part of my research," noted Patterson.
Other projects
Other projects include bat ecology in Mexico and Arizona to see how plants change over time, climate history in Iceland to ascertain the validity of Viking sagas, and a field study in the Yucatan peninsula comparing climate change to the rise and fall of the Mayan culture.
"The best thing about research is that you're not bored because it's always something new," stated Patterson. "A lot of things are unexpected and that's what makes it interesting. If everything happened the way we thought, there'd be no point in doing it in the first place."
In the course of his research, Patterson navigated language barriers, food issues, foreign electrical systems, different types of gasoline and vehicles.
And he faced a few tense moments. "We've had people board our boats in the Bahamas and people with guns jumped in the car in Venezuela," he related.
Featured on television
Patterson and his discoveries have been featured on the Travel Channel, Discovery Channel Canada, and Japanese and German television. He authored 40-plus articles for professional journals and magazines, wrote 250 newspaper articles, and in 2003 gave 35 conference presentations.
This year science will take Patterson to Iceland, Denmark, Australia and Greenland. In July, he'll fly from Australia to the North Pole in less than three days. "I essentially go from the tropics to Great Barrier Reef. I'll be the only one up there with a tan."
Success for Patterson includes "people citing your papers and someone in the science community thinking that what you're doing is pretty neat. The things I wrote in graduate school are still cited. Success is not about blowing the competition away. It's about moving science forward."