John Dighton

Now in his twelfth year of teaching at Rutgers, Professor John Dighton currently holds a joint appointment divided between the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Cook College, New Brunswick/Piscataway, and the Biology Department at Camden, in addition to which he is also the director of the field station of the Division of Pinelands Research. This is a complicated and demanding position, involving three far-flung locations, but one which Professor Dighton has shaped in such a way so as to make his teaching and research a magnet for student interest. A colleague details how John Dighton is “unusually dedicated” in his efforts to acquaint Cook College graduate students in Ecology and Evolution with the unique habitat of the New Jersey Pine Barrens. “A number of our graduate students have based all or part of their research at the Pinelands Field Station,” he writes, “and John has selflessly provided a supportive environment where their research can flourish.” Here Dighton’s success in winning competitive grants to enhance the lodging and research facilities also has contributed significantly toward the quality of the student experience.

Closer to home, John Dighton has played an important role in the revision of the Cook College Ecology and Evolution graduate core curriculum, served as past chair of graduate admissions, but perhaps most importantly opened the eyes of many students to the possibilities of his academic specialty, the ecology of fungi. Excellent testimony to John Dighton’s remarkable achievements at Rutgers comes from a letter signed by a full twenty-five Cook College graduate students which praises him for “his creative energy as an instructor, his volunteerism and participation in student events, and his capacity as a role model ecologist and scientist.”