Mark Harmon Oral History Interview, Part 1

After growing up in Massachusetts, attending Amherst College, and doing some work in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, it was a big step for Mark Harmon to travel west in 1980 to OSU to undertake a PhD with Jerry Franklin and working on wood decomposition. While still a PhD student in 1985 he installed the monumental 200-year log decomposition experiment and led a dozen more senior researchers on publication of a 170-page, now much-cited synthesis of knowledge of dead wood in temperate forest and stream ecosystem. In the context of global change, he subsequently expanded the scope of research, writing, and teaching activities to carbon dynamics and sequestration in forest and human-use systems.