Abstract
Professor Nathan Wendell Riser died at his home in Swampscott, Massachusetts on Wednesday July 26, 2006 at the age of 86. He was known to his colleagues as “Pete” and to his graduate students as “Doc.” He was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1920 where he completed secondary school in 1937. After attending the University of Utah for three years he transferred to the University of Illinois, Champagne, where he earned his B.S. degree in zoology in 1941. He enlisted in the military in 1942 and served as a Navy Corpsman in the Navy Medical Corp where he saw action in the Pacific Theater of WWII. He was discharged in 1945 and entered graduate school at Stanford University where he conducted research at the Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California. He earned an M.S. degree in 1948 and a Ph.D. in 1949 on the biology of tetraphyllidean cestodes associated with sharks and rays (“The morphology and systematic position of some little known Tetraphyllideans”) under the direction of Prof. Tage Skogsberg.
