UW-Milwaukee Distinguished Professor Emeritus Clifford H. Mortimer, Ph.D. (1911-2010) was
one of the premier limnologists in field who studied hydrodynamics in the United Kingdom in
his early career before completing the vast majority of his research in the U.S. along the
Great Lakes, and in particular of Lake Michigan. Mortimer was elected a Fellow of the Royal
Society of London in 1958. In 1966, he was named a Distinguished Professor of Zoology at UWM
and became the first director of the Center for Great Lakes Studies, now the School of
Freshwater Sciences. In the 1970s he became president of the American Society of Limnology
and Oceanography and then also president of the International Association for Great Lakes
Research. He received the A.C. Redfield Lifetime Achievement Award in 1995 for his
commitment to scientific excellence. Considered by some his magnum opus (among dozens of
published papers, special reports and other works), his book, Lake Michigan in Motion:
Response of an Inland Sea to Weather, Earth-Spin, and Human Activities, was published by the
University of Wisconsin Press in 2004.
