Neil Campbell, 58; Scholar Wrote Popular Biology Textbooks

Neil Campbell, 58, an educator who wrote five popular biology textbooks and a recent visiting scholar in botany and plant sciences at UC Riverside, died Thursday at Redlands Community Hospital of heart failure.

Born in Los Angeles, Campbell studied zoology at Cal State Long Beach and UCLA and earned his doctorate in plant biology at UC Riverside. He taught general biology for about 30 years at institutions that included Cornell, Pomona College and San Bernardino Valley College. He also did research in drought and salt tolerance in plants.

But Campbell was best known for his textbooks, which have been translated into five languages and used by more than 3.7 million students worldwide over the last 17 years. His textbook “Biology,” which he wrote with Jane Reece, was first published in 1987 and is now in its seventh edition. It is the most widely adopted undergraduate introductory biology text in the country, used by more than 60% of U.S. college biology majors.