Born in Môtiers, Switzerland, he was trained as a medical doctor before succumbing to his interest in scientific research. Moving to Paris he fell under the tutelage of [Alexander von Humboldt]? and [Georges Cuvier]?, who launched him on his careers of geology and zoology respectively.
Beginning in 1832, having returned to Neuchâtel? in his native Switzerland, Agassiz first made a name for himself as a studier of fossil fishes and as a man who could run a scientific department well. Under his care, the University of Neuchâtel soon became a leading institution for scientific inquiry. In 1837 Agassiz was the first to scientifically propose that the Earth had been subject to a past Ice Age, and during the remainder of his life found evidence of it in the Alps, in Scotland, and in North America. In 1840 he expanded on his ideas by publishing Étude sur les glaciers ("Study of Glaciers"), one of the first works to examine the role of glaciers and ice in the formation of landscapes.
In 1846 he came to the United States to deliver a series of lectures, and in 1848 was tempted to Harvard University where he became a professor of zoology and geology. His scientific studies dropped off, but he was a profound influence on the American branches of his two fields, teaching decades worth of future prominent scientists, including David Starr Jordan, Joel Asaph Allen, Joseph Le Conte, Nathaniel Shaler, and Alpheus Packard. In return his name appears attached to several species, and here and there throughout the American landscape, notably [Lake Agassiz]?, the Pleistocene precursor to [Lake Winnipeg]? and the [Red River]?.
Agassiz was one of the last major zoologists to resist Charles Darwin's theories on evolution, an attitude he would not relinquish for the rest of his life. He passed away in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1873.
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