James Foster”s life is full of funny stories.
“It”s been an interesting ride,” Foster said.
Foster, a biology professor at the University of Idaho, was born in a trailer home near Kansas City. That”s where he spent his earlier years growing up, and said he remembers bits of his childhood spent there.
“My sister and I used to go out when the thunderstorms and the tornado warnings were going off, we”d go into the backyard and lay down “¦ and watch the clouds swirling by,” he said.
It was during his childhood where Foster said he started developing a curiosity for almost all things he didn”t understand. He said his mother told him he learned to read by the age of 3.
That curiosity led Foster to excel in his education. He said he stopped taking math classes in junior high and instead taught himself. By the end of high school, he had run out of classes to take.
Besides his education, Foster was a member of his school”s swim team, choir, drama program and competed in speech and debate. Foster said the number of activities he was involved in never felt overwhelming to him.
“I don”t remember it being difficult,” he said. “Everything was fun. The problem was I couldn”t do everything.”
James Foster
After high school, Foster attended the University of Chicago, which he said he still regards as one of the top schools in the country. As an underclassman, he was taught by Nobel Prize-winning professors in classes of less than 20 students, he said.
Unlike most schools, Foster said a majority of the classes taught at Chicago were discussion-based. By his second year in school, one of his professors helped him get his first paper published.
“I wrote the paper for a class and a couple weeks later the teacher came up to me and said, “Oh by the way, I submitted your paper to a journal,”” he said.
Foster said he applied to work at UI as a joke.
“I applied here because I thought it would be fun to say that I interviewed in Moscow the year the Berlin Wall fell,” Foster said.
Though he originally applied to UI ironically, Foster said he quickly fell in love with the area. He started his career at the university teaching in the Computer Science department and then moved to biology. Currently he only teaches two courses, but he said he wishes he could teach more.
“There are some people who are just so incredibly good at what they do but they don”t care about the beauty of it,” he said. “They just care about getting it right, and god bless them. We need those people, but I couldn”t do that.”
Foster said his biggest accomplishment at UI so far was being a founder of the Institute for Bioinformatics and Evolutionary Studies (IBEST), which was created to bring scientists together to work on what they love. He said IBEST was founded by him and two other professors while sharing 14-year-old scotch in a hot tub one night in 1993.
Foster said he avoided Faculty Senate in previous years because he didn”t have time. Eventually, Foster said he realized he would never have enough time for it, but he is happy to be on Faculty Senate now because he thinks it is a good time for him to be involved.
Last year was his first year serving on Faculty Senate.
“It was a good year to be on Faculty Senate,” he said. “Last year a lot of important things happened.”
Foster said he isn”t quite sure what he will do in the 10 or so years he thinks he will remain at UI, but that doesn”t mean he doesn”t have goals for the future.
“I”ve been here for 26 years,” Foster said. “I”ve been invested in a lot. I know a lot of the history. I”ve fought carefully about a lot of these issues. I”m probably going to be here for another 10 years. I want to make this a place where I want to be.”
Erin Bamer can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter at @ErinBamer