I worked with Bland Ewing at UC-Berkeley in the summers that bracketed my Caltech undergraduate years in the early 1970s. Bland’s perspective and insights profoundly shaped my career, introducing me to novel ways to weave math, computers and biology at a time when few considered such a blend. He suggested I pursue a PhD in biostatistics at UC-Berkeley, which I did after taking a gap year as a Watson Fellow. We drifted apart during my graduate years as he moved from academia to the emerging tech sector. When my faculty trajectory at UW-Madison reached full professor in the mid 1990s, my personal life fell apart and I reached out to people from my earlier life. Nancy Sullivan told me that Bland was very sick and I should seek him out. I found him in Paradise, CA, in advanced stages of Huntington’s Disease. I started visiting him regularly and, after encouragement from my sister Lynn, began recording his life story and returning to the science questions that had inspired him and me so long ago. Bland died about ten years later, and I have been returning to those ideas and the tape recordings since I retired. This is about Bland, but it also about me and my journey.

In the summer of 1969, I met my first computer, a Varian, at a company, where I learned to toggle the boot block to initiate a program load. The next summer, after graduating from high school, I interned at Lawrence Berkeley Lab (LBL) where I encountered more computers and programming languages. I was promised a job for the following summer, after my first year at Caltech. However, that fell through and I had no options. My Dad happened to talk to David L Wood, UC-Berkeley professor of forest entomology, who said he might have a summer job for me. That opened the door.

David Wood introduced me to Bland Ewing who took me under his wing during three summers, 1971-73. He taught me about computers at a time when there were only two on the Berkeley campus and just a few at LBL. Bland built thought models based on David Wood’s research into the ecology of the western pine beetle and Ponderosa pine trees. Bland introduced me to a way of modeling organismal behavior, which he called quantitative population ethology, but now I think of as systems ethology, that still seems innovative and important today. The ideas Bland was working on then never got properly published and were largely forgotten.

But let’s step back. I encountered Bland’s ideas while at Caltech, but could not see how to act on them at that time. When I began graduate school at UC-Berkeley in biostatistics, I thought I might explore Bland’s ideas, but they seemed too ambitious and I needed more training. Further, while I had some contact with Bland around that time, we drifted apart as the forest entomology modeling group lost funding. Bland gravitated toward the emerging field of microcomputers.

Later, as a faculty member at UW-Madison, I was distracted by the need to “publish or perish”, and Bland’s work seemed too broad to tackle. In 1996, as my personal life was falling apart, with a divorce as I completed a book and got full professor, I reconnected with old friends in California, predating my faculty career. I visited Nancy Sullivan in Stinson Beach, CA, a neighbor of Bland’s whom he had introduced me to back in the 1970s. She told me that Bland was really sick, and I should look him up. I learned he was suffering from Huntington’s Disease and living a fairly minimal life in Paradise, CA. I began visiting him regularly, flying from Madison to Sacramento and driving north to Paradise several times a year. We started working together again on his modeling ideas as I learned his life story. My sister Lynn said, you have to record his life story, which I did over the next ten years until his death.

I had a burst of research activity around 2000 during a sabbatical when I focused on how to advance the systems ethology ideas. I reconnected with Jim Barbieri, now in his 80s, who was part of that initial work in the 1970s and who visited Bland with me in the 1990s and 2000s both in person and by phone. We published a paper together: Ewing B, Yandell BS , Barbieri JF, Luck RF, Forster LD (2002) Event-driven competing risks. Ecological Modelling 158: 35–50. I built this and other aspects of Bland’s modeling approach into a prototype shiny app in an R software package, ewing. This research activity with Bland was great fun, and a sheer delight for him.

Much of that dialog Bland and I had, often with Jim Barbieri and occasional other friends, can be found in the draft book, Bland Ewing Story that I have been writing since the mid 1990s. Still, I was distracted by my career, and left the transcript of his life, as well as the modeling ideas, to gather dust. In fact, I had to hunt down the box of cassette tapes in a storage room as I was getting ready to retire.

Now, in the mid-2020s, I am returning once again to this project. I have begun working with a person in UW-Madison Communication Sciences and Disorders to digitize the tapes from the 1990s and improve the transcriptions originally done by Pat Klitzke. My CSD colleague is interested in how chronic disease such as HD alters speech, while I want to fill out Bland’s life story.

I also have ambitions to expand the software package to model predator-prey populations at scale. Lately, I have been using AI to improve the ewing package, but it has a long way to go. Bland’s scientific ideas are gathered in the beginnings of a book on Systems Ethology. There are still many gaps to fill, but I see a way forward for this as a companion to the package.

It is nice to continue imagining my collaboration with Bland Ewing, and to notice how it continues to evolve over the past 50 years.

Updated June 6, 2026. Based also on writings from the 1990s to present.