Luis Felipe Baptista (9 August 1941 - 12 June 2000) was an American ornithologist of Portuguese–Chinese descent born in Hong Kong.[1]
Education
Born and raised in Hong Kong and Macau, where he lived until 1961, Baptista emigrated to San Francisco as a teenager where he took up a job at the California Academy of Sciences as a curatorial assistant. During his years at the Academy of Sciences, he developed an interest in ornithology under the influence of Dr. Robert T. Orr, then chairman and curator of the Department of Ornithology and Mammalogy. He earned BA and MS degrees at the University of San Francisco and was admitted to the University of California at Berkeley in 1968 to work on a Ph.D. in zoology under the supervision of Ned K. Johnson. His doctoral research on the song behavior of the White-crowned Sparrow (Zonotrichia leucophrys) led to a series of studies that established him as a leading expert of bird vocalization through the rest of his academic career.
Research
After completing his PhD in 1975, Baptista moved to Germany to continue his research as a postdoc in Klaus Immelmann's lab and as a fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Physiology and Behavior (now part of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior), with Hans Löhrl. In 1973 he returned to California to take up an assistant professor position at Occidental College in Los Angeles, where he also held the role of curator of the Moore Laboratory of Zoology. From 1980 until his death in 2000, Baptista was Curator of Birds and Chairman of the Department of Ornithology and Mammalogy at the California Academy of Sciences. In 1982, he became a fellow of the Academy.