Bill Patterson

Bill is an isotope biogeochemistry professor and director of the Saskatchewan Isotope Laboratory, with field experience on all seven continents, and in many of the World's marine and lacustrine environments. Bill's research interests include global carbon cycling, fish behavior, bat, penguin, and woolly mammoth ecology, tree physiology, meteorology, climate change, evolution and extinction, marine and freshwater chemistry, archaeology, history, anthropology, cave environments, etc. As a grad student, Bill pioneered the use of microsampled fish otoliths for life-history and climate reconstruction.

His work is conducted in Arctic/Antarctic, alpine, desert, tropical rain and cloud forests, temperate and maritime environments. He has appeared in documentaries on the interpretation of the Bible, agriculture, climate change, fish evolution and behavior, bird behavior, trees physiology, bat ecology, and Viking history. Bill has developed robotic microsampling devices that are used to extract microgram-sized samples for isotopic analyses, and has published over 100 articles in the scientific literature and magazines.

Bill is a native of Youngstown Ohio, receiving his B.S. degree in Biology and Geology from Youngstown State University. He received a M.S. degree in aqueous geochemistry/oceanography and a Ph.D. in isotope chemistry from the University of Michigan. Bill resides in Saskatoon Saskatchewan when he is not motorcycling across the continent or sampling around the World.