[Coral-List] Scott Santos

[Mary-Alice Coffroth]

It is with great sorrow that we announce the loss of Scott Santos who passed away last week.  A pioneer in the field, Scott made important contributions to our understanding of zooxanthellae diversity, dispersal, and ecology. He was an exceptional and computationally rigorous scientist/geneticist/ecologist who also made numerous contributions to many other areas of biology ranging from coral apicomplexans, invertebrate phylogenomics, and especially on the crustaceans and microbial communities associated with anchialine ecosystems. Scott held a faculty position at the University of Auburn from 2004-2021 where he served as Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences from 2018-2021. He was a previous program officer at the National Science Foundation and in 2021 he accepted an Empire Innovation Professor at the University at Buffalo. More importantly he was a genuine and wonderful person who will be missed by all who knew him.

We are compiling memories of him for is daughter River (age 14) to have, so that in the years to come she can look over them and think, "That was my dad."  We are hoping to make a Shutterfly book for River.  Please send me (coffroth at buffalo.edu<mailto:coffroth at buffalo.edu>) your happy memories, funny stories, tributes, shared experiences, admirations... anything at all that you think would be meaningful for his daughter to have and cherish as another way of knowing her dad through the eyes of others who knew him.  It can be long, or just a sentence or two.  Whatever you have to share.  If you have pictures that we could include, please send them as well, but include a short caption to put the pictures in context.  We'd like this book to be as full and meaningful as possible, so please share this request with anyone you can think of that might like to contribute to it (other colleagues, students, friends...) - even going back to Scott's time as a graduate student and before.

There will be a visitation and celebration of life next Saturday, April 20, from 3-5 p.m. at Lombardo Funeral Home in Orchard Park: https://www.lombardofuneralhome.com/orchard-park

Mary Alice and Todd

Mary Alice Coffroth, PhD
Professor
Department of Geology
Office: 457 Hochstetter Hall

126 Cooke Hall
Department of Geology
State University of New York at Buffalo
Buffalo NY 14260

Phone: 716-645-4871 (office)
      716-645- 4874 (lab)
Fax:   716-645-3999
Email: Coffroth at buffalo.edu<mailto:Coffroth at buffalo.edu>
Web page:  http://burr.bio.buffalo.edu/<https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__burr.bio.buffalo.edu_&d=DwMDaQ&c=Oo8bPJf7k7r_cPTz1JF7vEiFxvFRfQtp-j14fFwh71U&r=pLB0OGe38hM4pJZZFglWpQz-fLkc9E0r1Osik9lzZgY&m=lSTud2p0An8y6p7hiG7kA8VPboauSGE7MteNBu_b5DA&s=FoaANqfNKK9Oxqo3kNcS518I-EuBoBpDiPv6jqq5sjc&e=>