Donald
Warren Hagen, Curator of Fishes
Donald Warren Hagen (1934-) replaced McPhail as Curator of
Fishes in 1967. Hagen
received his B.S. (1956) and M.S. (1962) degrees at the University
of Texas and his Ph. D. in 1965 at
the University of British
Columbia.
He was mainly an experimentalist interested in the evolution of fishes,
particularly the speciation process, using the three-spine stickleback, Gasterosteus aculeatus, as
the experimental animal. After a year of post-doctoral work at Yale
University, Hagen
was appointed to the School of Fisheries
faculty effective 1 July 1967.60
Hagen
was listed in UW course catalogs as teaching courses on Zoogeography of Fishes,
Fish Behavior, and Speciation.61
He supervised the research of two graduate students (Appendix),
employed one post-doctoral student, and received an NSF grant for his research
on sticklebacks. Hagen
published papers on sticklebacks based on his research in the School (e.g.,
Hagen and McPhail, 1970; Hagen and Gilbertson, 1972; Hagen,
1973). The general ichthyology courses
of the School, however, were still taught by Arthur Welander.
The number of accessions to
the Collection was moderately high during Hagen’s
tenure, an estimated 1,061 lots (Table 1),62
but in his five years at the School
of Fisheries he was not promoted
and did not receive tenure.63 He left the UW in 1972 and completed his
academic career in the Biology Department of the University
of New Brunswick,
Canada.64 The position he held at the UW was not filled
for nearly six years. The maintenance
and supervision of the Fish Collection once again reverted back to Arthur Welander.
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