College of Sciences Newsletter

Edition 13

June 1, 2002

New Department of Biological Sciences Chair Named


Lytton John Musselman, Mary Payne Hogan Professor of Biology, was recently named as the next chair for the Department of Biological Sciences and will take over when he returns from the American University of Beirut where he is a visiting professor. Musselman came to Old Dominion University in 1973 after receiving his doctorate from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Musselman is also manager of the Blackwater Ecologic Preserve, a three-hundred plus acre site forty miles from the Old Dominion campus in Isle of Wight County. This preserve hosts some of the rarest habitat types in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Being a teacher and researcher of botany, Musselman often goes where plants naturally grow and live and has visited such places as the Mediterranean, Africa and the Middle East. He has devoted the majority of his career to studying parasitic plants (witchweeds, broomrapes, dodders and the family of Hydnoraceae). More recently, he has worked on plants of the Bible and other aspects of Middle East and Western Asia ethnobotany (including plants of the Qu’ran).

For more information on Dr. Musselman or his research, go to his web site at http://www.odu.edu/sci/biology/musselman.html.

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Musselman in the Bekaa region of Lebanon with one of his plant systematics students from AUB.

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Musselman in the Bekaa region with snow covered Mount Hermon in the background.