Charles Potter came to the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History in the early 1970’s after finishing his undergraduate degrees from the State University of New York and Syracuse University. Together with James Mead, Potter helped establish a national marine mammal stranding network. Today that network is administered by the National Marine Fisheries Service. In the time Potter and Mead have been at the Smithsonian the marine mammal collection has become the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of its kind in the world.

Potter’s field work has taken him from the North Pacific to the tropics and the Antarctic. Together with colleagues at the Fisheries Service he has been actively working to reduce the incidental take of marine mammals in commercial fisheries. In addition to his duties as the collection manager for marine mammals, he is working on bottlenose dolphin zoogeography and feeding ecology. Most recently he has been working with nations of the lower Caribbean to establish a multinational response to marine mammal events.