Professor Timothy Mousseau received his doctoral degree in 1988 from McGill University and completed a NSERC (Canada)  postdoctoral fellowship  in Population Biology at the University of California, Davis. He joined the faculty at the University of South Carolina in 1991 and is currently the Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences.

Professor Mousseau’s experience includes having served as a program officer at the National Science Foundation, on the editorial board for several journals, and on NSF, USGS, SFI, and NIH advisory panels. He has published over 90 scholarly articles and  has edited two books (Maternal Effects as Adaptations, 1998; Adaptive Genetic Variation in the Wild, 2000; both published by Oxford University Press). His books and papers have been cited over 2900 times, and he has been funded since 1988 by wide variety of funding agencies including the NSF, USDA, DOD, NATO, NSERC (Canada), CNRS (France), the National Geographic Society, and the Samuel Freeman Charitable Trust. He and his students have worked on a wide diversity of organisms, from bacteria to beetles to birds, and his primary areas of research interest include the genetic basis of adaptive variation, and the evolution of maternal effects.

Since 1999, Professor Mousseau and his collaborators have explored the ecological and evolutionary consequences of low-dose radiation in natural populations inhabiting the Chernobyl region of Ukraine, and more recently, Belarus. His research suggests that many species of plants and animals experience increased mutational loads as a result of exposure to radionuclides stemming from the Chernobyl disaster. In some species (e.g. the barn swallow, Hirundo rustica), this mutational load has had dramatic consequences for reproduction and survival. Dr. Mousseau’s current research is aimed at elucidating the causes of variation among different species in their apparent sensitivity to radionuclide exposure.

Dr. Mousseau's publications.

Past and present students and postdocs.

Recent activities related to Chernobyl.