made important contributions to science while a faculty member at the University of Virginia. Academic career at University of Georgia In September 1940, Odum took a job as an instructor of biology at the University of Georgia (Athens, Georgia). In the late 1940s, while serving on the University's biology faculty committee, which was then drawing up a new curriculum, he concluded there was an urgent need to incorporate the subject of ecology, since he learned that his colleagues generally did not know what ecology (in its own right) might be. He founded the Institute of Ecology, later named for him. In 2007 the Institute of Ecology, which Odum founded at the University of Georgia, was named as the Odum School of Ecology, the first stand-alone academic unit of a research university dedicated to ecology. Odum also founded two field research stations as a faculty member at the University of Georgia: the University of Georgia Marine Institute and the Savannah River Ecology Lab. Work Ecosystems In the 1940s and 1950s, "ecology" was not yet a field of study that had been defined as a separate discipline. Even professional biologists seemed to Odum to be generally under-educated about how the Earth's ecological systems interact with one another. Odum brought forward the importance of ecology as a discipline that should be a fundamental dimension of the training of a biologist. Odum adopted and developed further the term "ecosystem". Although sometimes said to have been coined by Raymond Lindeman in 1942, the term "ecosystem" first appeared in a 1935 publication by the British ecologist, Arthur Tansley, and had in 1930 been coined by Tansley's colleague, Arthur Roy Clapham. Before Odum, the ecology of specific organisms and environments had been studied on a more limited scale within individual sub-disciplines of biology. Many scientists doubted that it could be studied on a large scale, or as a discipline in itself. Odum wrote a textbook on ecology with his brother, Howard Thomas Odum, a graduate student at Yale. The Odum brothers' book (first edition, 1953), Fundamentals of Ecology, was the only textbook in the field for about ten years. Among other things, the Odums explored how one natural system can interact with another. Environmentalism While Odum did wish to influence the knowledge base and thinking of fellow biologists and of college and university students, his historical role was not as a promoter of public environmentalism as we