Dr. Rory Carroll has been a teaching faculty member in the Department of Biological Sciences at Pitt since 2021. He is a conservation biologist broadly interested in human-wildlife interactions and natural history education.
He graduated Summa Cum Laude from SUNY Plattsburgh with a Bachelor’s degree in Biology and minors in Ecology and Chemistry, then earned a Ph.D. from the University of New Hampshire where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow studying bobcat population dynamics across New England and Quebec. His graduate research focused on how anthropogenic impacts such as urbanization, habitat fragmentation, and altered wildlife communities changed the genetic structure, foraging behavior, and physiology of bobcat populations.
Previously, he was an assistant professor of Biology at Southern Arkansas University and held positions at the Lake Champlain Research Institute and Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. Outside the realm of science, Dr. Carroll is credited as an actor or director in dozens of professional and amateur theatre and film productions. Once, he even played guitar on the National Mall at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival – just like Bob Dylan!