Ed Tarvyd

Professor

“I’m the only instructor my students will ever have that flunked kindergarten.”

1989 was a moderately good year for Ed Tarvyd. He recently returned from an October United Nations conference in Switzerland where he spoke to people from 103 countries on the fate of the world’s coral reefs. Last August, he took 30 people on his eleventh study trip to Tahiti. Last May included his 50th trip to Morro Bay with 100 students and an award from the University of Texas at Austin for Outstanding Educator. Not bad for someone whose initial problems with English saw him repeat his first year at school.

Ed Tarvyd, whose parents were Lithuanian immigrants, credits his mother with being the force that sparked his academic career and his insatiable curiosity about his world. “She was yanked out of the fourth grade,” explains Ed, “to work on the farm. It was a crushing blow for her,” And though Ed’s father died and his mother was forced to work in garment industry sweatshops in Los Angeles, “she absolutely insisted on college,” urging her son into medicine.

But at UCLA, Ed fell into a class in biology. “It was comparative anatomy,” he remembers. “It introduced me to evolution, phylogeny and concepts of geological time. And that was it!”

Ed’s students are the beneficiaries of his lifelong study of the sea and its sciences, “All of what I experience,” he says, “I feed back into my students.”

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