Carl Fredrik Christoffer Schander (21 May 1960 – 21 February 2012) was a professor in
marine biology
Marine biology is the scientific study of the biology of marine life, organisms in the sea. Given that in biology many phyla, families and genera have some species that live in the sea and others that live on land, marine biology classifi ...
at the
University of Bergen,
Norway
Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of ...
. He was also a thematic leader at the Centre of Excellence in Geobiology. His doctoral thesis (1997,
University of Gothenburg, Sweden) explored the evolutionary relationships of the parasitic marine
gastropod
The gastropods (), commonly known as snails and slugs, belong to a large taxonomic class of invertebrates within the phylum Mollusca called Gastropoda ().
This class comprises snails and slugs from saltwater, from freshwater, and from land. T ...
family
Pyramidellidae
Pyramidellidae, common name the pyram family, or pyramid shells, is a voluminous taxonomic family of mostly small and minute ectoparasitic sea snails, marine heterobranch gastropod molluscs. The great majority of species of pyrams are micromoll ...
. He worked on marine
invertebrates
Invertebrates are a paraphyletic group of animals that neither possess nor develop a vertebral column (commonly known as a ''backbone'' or ''spine''), derived from the notochord. This is a grouping including all animals apart from the chordat ...
, mainly
molluscs, and published more than 90 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals, 76 are indexed in the
Web of Knowledge, and fourteen of them have been cited ten or more times.
According to his web page, he considered the goal of his research to be understanding the roles that evolutionary forces and
phylogeny
A phylogenetic tree (also phylogeny or evolutionary tree Felsenstein J. (2004). ''Inferring Phylogenies'' Sinauer Associates: Sunderland, MA.) is a branching diagram or a tree showing the evolutionary relationships among various biological s ...
have played in creating organismal diversity. To help develop this understanding, he used
phylogenetic
In biology, phylogenetics (; from Greek φυλή/ φῦλον [] "tribe, clan, race", and wikt:γενετικός, γενετικός [] "origin, source, birth") is the study of the evolutionary history and relationships among or within groups ...
analyses that integrated morphological, ultrastructural and molecular data. His research focused on molluscs and more specifically on the ectoparasitic pyramidellid gastropods and the, shell-less, primary deep-sea
aplacophorans, the
biogeography
Biogeography is the study of the distribution of species and ecosystems in geographic space and through geological time. Organisms and biological communities often vary in a regular fashion along geographic gradients of latitude, elevation, ...
of these animals, and the relationship between the molluscs and other animal groups.
In addition to taxonomy and systematics, he published several papers on the use of
formalin fixed tissue for molecular studies. He was active in the
DNA barcoding community.
The
World Register of Marine Species mentions 33 new gastropod species named by Schander
WoRMS: Species named by Schander
/ref>
Personal life
Schander was born in Sweden
Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic countries, Nordic c ...
in 1960. He lived in his home town of Borås
Borås ( , , ) is a city (officially, a locality) and the seat of Borås Municipality, Västra Götaland County, Sweden. It had 66,273 inhabitants in 2010.
Geography
Borås is located at the point of two crossing railways, among them th ...
and became one of the most active Swedish science fiction fans in the 1980s, creating fanzines such as ''Semikolon A & B'' and ''I väntan på PEP'' and the APA ''Efterapa'', and arranging science fiction conventions such as RegnCon in 1981. He died after a short illness on 21 February 2012.
Partial bibliography
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External links
Christoffer Schander"Direktør ved Universitetsmuseet Christoffer Schander er død" Universitetsmuseet i Bergen website; 21 February 2012
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Schander, Christoffer
Swedish malacologists
Swedish marine biologists
Swedish emigrants to Norway
Academic staff of the University of Bergen
Scientists from Bergen
People from Borås
1960 births
2012 deaths