Jay Hosler

The Sandwalk Adventures, an Eisner Award nominee, follows a conversation about evolution between Charles Darwin and a follicle mite living in his left eyebrow. Optical Allusions, funded in part by a National Science Foundation grant, explains the evolution of the eye and vision by following the story of Wrinkles the Wonderbrain. Hosler is also an entomologist and David K Goodman '74 Professor of Biology at Juniata College.

• Name — Jay Hosler • Birth Name — Jay Scott Hosler • Occupation — Full Professor of Biology at Juniata College, Author, illustrator • Notable Works — Clan Apis, The Sandwalk Adventures, Optical Allusions The Last of the Sandwalkers

Hosler grew up in Huntington, Indiana and is a 1989 graduate of DePauw University. He received a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana in 1995, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Ohio State University's Rothenbuhler Honey Bee Research Laboratory. Hosler was not formally trained in art, but grew up reading comics and says he "was always a doodler". He drew comic strips for the student newspaper when he was at DePauw, and was paid for a daily comic strip in the student paper when he was at Notre Dame. He first mixed his interests in science and cartooning with his 1997 publication Cow-Boy. As an associate professor at Juniata College, Hosler has brought his interests in comics and teaching together in several ways. In addition to creating Clan Apis and The Sandwalk Adventures, Hosler was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to create a hybrid of comics and traditional textbook covering the evolution of vision and sensory biology, Optical Allusions. "Student performance ratings in science in secondary education are dropping at an alarming rate, so clearly something isn't working well in the classroom," Hosler says. "We can't be afraid to try something radical to change how students learn." Hosler has also team-taught (with a historian) a course on "Comics and Culture". He and his wife Lisa have two sons, Maxwell Scott and Jack DeMoss.

• Clan Apis, published by Active Synapse, 2000 • The Sandwalk Adventures, published by Active Synapse, 2003 • Optical Allusions, published by Active Synapse, 2008 • Evolution. (art by Kevin Cannon and Zander Cannon) Hill and Wang, 2011 • Last of the Sandwalkers published by First Second, 2015 • The Way of the Hive: A Honey Bee's Story, published by HarperAlley, 2021 • Santiago!: Santiago Ramón y Cajal!Artist, Scientist, Troublemaker, published by Margaret Ferguson Books, 2022

• Cow-Boy #1, Active Synapse, 1997 • "The Conundrum of the Killer Coronavirus" in the Emerging Diseases issues of Your World: Biotechnology and You (14.1), 2004 • "The Diabolical Dr. Nonono" in AWIS Magazine, 2004 • illustrated 6 pages in Suspended in Language by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Purvis, G. T. Labs, 2004