Clifford Cunningham -- The 99%

By day, he’s an evolutionary biolo- gist who has coauthored respected research studies on postglacial marine habitats and beetle mating rituals.
By night, and anytime else he can
fit it in, he is a singer-songwriter. Cliff Cunningham ’78 used his 2014 sabbatical from his professorship at Duke University to produce an album of poignant songs with an international perspective. Some harken back to the folk protest songs
of the 1960s and a few of the antiwar songs deal with wars even longer ago.
The urge to write and sing isn’t some midlife crisis, however.
“I had made a fairly serious push for music right after college,” Cunningham says. “Basically I was very serious
then about making a music career. However, the early ’80s were ter-
rible times for a singer-songwriter. Madonna succeeded where I failed.” So Cunningham, who grew up in Panama, followed his college studies with graduate work and eventual professorship at Duke University. He had worked as a volunteer at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute for two summers and discovered a passion for evolution. - Taft Bulletin