Dr. Zardus is the head of the Biology Department and a Professor of Marine Biology. He received his Ph.D. in 1998 from Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts. Following post-doctoral work in Boston and Hawaii, he came to The Citadel in 2005. His expertise is in the biology of invertebrate larvae, molecular evolution, deep-sea biology, and the biology of symbiosis, in particular the association of barnacles with sea turtles. He is a subject editor for the international journal Marine Biology Research and supervises graduate students in their research as an adjunct faculty member of the College of Charleston’s Graduate Program in Marine Biology. His teaching specialties include Introduction to Biology, Marine Biology, and Invertebrate Zoology. Dedicated to teaching biology from the living laboratory whenever possible, he also co-instructs a field course in Tropical Rainforest and Reef Ecology in Central America each Maymester.
Dr. Zardus recently published an article, entitled “500 million years to mobility: Directed locomotion and its ecological function in a turtle barnacle” (Chan et al. 2021. “Proceedings of the Royal Society B” (print 13 Oct. 2021)) A summary article was published in The Scientist magazine (6 Oct. 2021)
The work is also noted in “Science” under “Scienceshots”
Degrees
- Ph.D. in Biology – Northeastern University
- M.S. in Zoology – Brigham Young University
- B.S. in Zoology – Brigham Young University