Biologist With a Mission

Allan Scholz studied how salmon navigate by smell, then used his findings to help restore Inland Northwest fisheries.

Back in 1980, Al Scholz, a fisheries specialist armed with a newly awarded doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, arrived in Cheney to begin work with Eastern’s biology faculty. He was a good fit, and it wasn’t long before his teaching appointment blossomed into a four-decade-long research and instruction career centered on regional fish, most notably, salmon. It was work that would bind him, permanently and profoundly, to the Native peoples for whom salmon are not a resource but a central part of their historical, cultural and spiritual identity.

One of Scholz’s first acts at EWU was striking in its directness. After securing funding from the Bonneville Power Administration, he telephoned every Native student at the university and invited them to work in his laboratory. Eventually more than 150 students would pass through Scholz’s lab, many of them tribal members who went on to careers in fisheries research and management.

Within two years he had also helped the five tribes of the Upper Columbia—the Coeur d’Alene, Colville, Kalispel, Kootenai, and Spokane—establish the Upper Columbia United Tribes, a consortium devoted to science-based stewardship of fish and water.

Scholz was best known for his findings related to olfactory imprinting and homing in salmon—the mysterious capacity of a fish to smell its way back to the stream where it was born. His applied work was equally consequential. A 1986 feasibility study led by Scholz, for example, contributed to the construction of tribal hatcheries that now produce millions of kokanee salmon annually for Washington’s Lake Roosevelt. His work established kokanee runs at multiple sites and helped transform the reservoir’s fishery.

Over the course of his career, Scholz published six books on Eastern Washington’s fishes, authored 147 technical reports and secured 145 research grants, all while teaching full courseloads. The Sierra Club awarded him its Watershed Hero distinction in 2015. He retired the same year, then showed up at his office the next morning and kept working for another decade.

Allan T. Scholz, professor of biology emeritus, died on Feb. 15, 2026. He was 78 years old.