[2] In 1978, he received his PhD in zoology at the University of California, Berkeley under the direction of Frank Pitelka with his dissertation "Geographical ecology of Neotropical Kingfishers",[2] based on almost two years of fieldwork in Amazonian Colombia and Bolivia.
Remsen published his first scientific paper at age 20, and published other technical papers during his graduate student years, including the article "On taking field notes" in the journal American Birds which became much-noticed by field observers and American birders in the following decades.
[2] While at LSU, Remsen spent a total of two years in the remote areas of the Amazon and the Andes, which became the basis for the book An Annotated List of the Birds of Bolivia (ISBN 978-0931130168), which was published in 1989 in collaboration with Melvin Alvah Traylor Jr.
[7] In 2016, Remsen was one of the co-authors of the richly illustrated field guide Birds of Bolivia (ISBN 978-9990596182) along with Sebastian K. Herzog, Ryan S. Terrill, A. E. Jahn, O. Maillard Z., V. H. García-Solíz, R. MacLeod, A. Maccormick, and J. Q. Vidoz.
[2] In 1994, he was commemorated with the species' epithet of the vulnerable chestnut-bellied cotinga (Doliornis remseni) which is found in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.