Scarlet Ribbons: An Electrical Odyssey

About the Book

A personal memoire concerning the author’s education and 57-year teaching and research career at the University of Virginia.

About the Author

De Forest Mellon, Jr. was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1934. He attended public schools in Shaker Heights and spent his final two years in high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. His undergraduate studies were at Yale University, and he began his graduate studies at The Johns Hopkins University in 1957, receiving his Ph.D. in sensory neurobiology in 1961. Upon completion of his graduate work, Mellon joined the laboratory of Donald Kennedy at Stanford University, where he was postdoctoral fellow for two years. In 1963, Mellon was recruited by the University of Virginia, where he has remained as a professor and now professor emeritus for sixty-three years. Mellon has been publishing the results of his research into different aspects of neurobiology continuously since 1961. In 1968 he published “The Physiology of Sense Organs” (W.H. Freeman & Company). He has received numerous grants from the National Science Foundation, The National Institutes of Health, and the Muscular Dystrophy Association. He is a former Guggenheim Fellow (1966-67), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Thomas Jefferson Visiting Fellow of Downing College at The University of Cambridge. He resides near the village of Free Union, Virginia.