Class
| • | 2. Biological Sciences | [X] |
Subdivision
| • | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | [X] |
| | 21 | Name: | Dr. Garrett Hardin | | | Institution: | University of California, Santa Barbara | | | Year Elected: | 1974 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1915 | | | Death Date: | September 14, 2003 | | | | |
| 22 | Name: | Dr. Caryl P. Haskins | | | Year Elected: | 1955 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1908 | | | Death Date: | October 8, 2001 | | | | |
| 23 | Name: | Dr. Kristen Hawkes | | | Institution: | Univresity of Utah | | | Year Elected: | 2021 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
Kristen Hawkes is Distinguished Professor in Anthropology at the University of Utah who continues to investigate human life history evolution. That began with ethnographic behavioral ecology in two hunter-gatherer communities where hunters fail daily but successes are bonanzas for all. Those findings suggested men’s risky hunting may be better explained as status competition than as paternal provisioning. Quantitative observations showed savanna hunter-gatherers’ day-to-day reliance on resources that infants and children are too small to acquire for themselves. In contrast, our great ape cousins rely on foods that infants pick and eat while still nursing. That contrast, combined with evolutionary theory to explain mammalian life history variation, highlighted the importance of Hadza grandmothers’ dependable foraging productivity. Their reliable subsidies for dependent juveniles allow mothers to bear next babies sooner. The same tradeoffs that modern Hadza face likely confronted ancestral hominin populations colonizing the expanding savannas in ancient Africa. Mathematical modeling to explore likely consequences shows that given mammalian regularities, great ape-like life histories plus grandmothers’ subsidies evolve human-like postmenopausal longevity, slower maturation, shorter birth intervals and male-biased sex ratios in the fertile ages. Initially aimed to explain the evolution of postmenopausal longevity, a grandmother hypothesis now helps explain other distinctly human features, including pair bonding, bigger brains, and preoccupation with engaging others that begins in infancy.
Hawkes received a BS from Iowa State, MA and PhD from the University of Washington in Cultural Anthropology, and a long (informal) postdoc in Evolutionary Ecology after joining the Utah Anthropology faculty. A member of the Scientific Executive Council of the Leakey Foundation, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. | |
| 24 | Name: | Dr. Hopi E. Hoekstra | | | Institution: | Harvard University; Howard Hughes Medical Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2018 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1972 | | | | | | |
Hopi E. Hoekstra is the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology in the Departments of Organismic & Evolutionary Biology and the Molecular & Cellular Biology at Harvard University. She is the Curator of Mammals in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, an Institute Member at the Broad Institute and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Her research focuses on understanding the evolution and genetics of morphological and behavioral traits that affect fitness of individuals in the wild. Using deer mice as a model system, she first dissected the molecular, genetic and developmental basis of camouflaging coloration to understand the mechanisms driving adaptation. Later, she focused on unraveling the genetic and neurobiological underpinnings of complex natural behaviors.
She received her B.A. from UC Berkeley and her Ph.D. from the University of Washington. She has received Young Investigator awards from the American Society of Naturalists and the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, and most recently, the Lounsbery Medal from the National Academy of Sciences (2015). She gave the 2013 Commencement speech at UC Berkeley’s Integrative Biology Department and has been profiled in The New York Times. In 2016, she was elected into the National Academy of Sciences and in 2017, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She also teaches in Harvard’s introductory Life Science course Genetics, Genomics and Evolution to approximately 500 freshmen each year, and has been awarded the Fannie Cox Prize and a Harvard College Professorship for teaching excellence. | |
| 25 | Name: | Dr. F. Clark Howell | | | Institution: | University of California, Berkeley | | | Year Elected: | 1975 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1925 | | | Death Date: | March 10, 2007 | | | | |
| 26 | Name: | Dr. G. Evelyn Hutchinson | | | Institution: | Yale University | | | Year Elected: | 1956 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1903 | | | Death Date: | 5/17/91 | | | | |
| 27 | Name: | Dr. John Imbrie | | | Institution: | Brown University | | | Year Elected: | 1981 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1925 | | | Death Date: | May 13, 2016 | | | | | | |
One of the founders of modern paleooceanography, John Imbrie was the Henry L. Doherty Professor of Oceanography Emeritus at Brown University at the time of his death on May 13, 2016, at the age of 90. He had taught at Brown since 1967. He earned his B.A. from Princeton University in 1948 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University in 1949 and 1951, respectively. Before moving to Brown, Dr. Imbrie taught at Columbia University from 1952-67, starting as assistant professor and ultimately becoming chairman of the Department of Geological Sciences. Dr. Imbrie pioneered the use of computers to analyze microscopic marine fossil data. In the early seventies, he led an international research effort that solved the longstanding mystery of what caused the Earth's great ice ages. Using marine fossils in ocean sediments to unravel the history of the Earth's oceans and climate, Dr. Imbrie helped confirm the theory that the Earth's irregular orbital motions accounted for the climatic changes that caused vast ice sheets to wax and wane on Earth over the past million years. In addition to more than 60 articles in scientific journals dealing with the Earth's past climate, Dr. Imbrie published four books, including Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery, which he wrote with his daughter Katherine, and which won the 1976 Phi Beta Kappa prize. Dr. Imbrie was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1978, and in 1981 was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship. He was a fellow of the Geological Society of America, the American Meteorological Society and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He had been honored with Columbia University's Vetlesen Prize, the American Geophysical Union's Maurice Ewing Medal, the Lyell Medal for Geology of the Geological Society of London, and the Vega Medal of the Swedish Society of Anthropology and Geography. He also served on numerous national and international scientific advisory committees. | |
| 28 | Name: | Dr. Nina G. Jablonski | | | Institution: | Pennsylvania State University | | | Year Elected: | 2009 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1953 | | | | | | |
Nina G. Jablonski: Short Biographical Sketch
I was born and raised in upstate New York, and owe my interest in natural history to my upbringing on a farm. I was inspired to pursue a career in the study of human evolution by documentary accounts of the famed paleontologist, Louis Leakey, who recovered important fossils of ancient humans at Olduvai Gorge in East Africa. I completed an A. B. at Bryn Mawr College with a major in biology in 1975, and then went on to complete a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Washington in 1981. I have always had an insatiable interest in reconstructing the lifestyles and appearance of extinct animals, including our ancestors.
My research has focused on primate and human evolution, and in particular, on the role that changing environments have played in shaping the adaptations of primates and humans through time. I studied the anatomy and evolution of a lineage of Old World monkeys for my dissertation, and have maintained and expanded that research to consider the evolution of the whole group in relation to changes in the physical and biotic environment through time. I have been fortunate to be able to participate in paleontological field work in eastern Africa and many parts of southern and eastern Asia. I have a current paleontological field project in Yunnan Province in southwestern China that involves the exploration of a late Miocene primate-bearing site.
In contrast to many of my colleagues, I enjoy the study of important aspects of primate and human evolution that are not recorded in the fossil record, including the evolution of skin. This research is challenging because it requires drawing upon diverse bodies of evidence, from anatomy and physiology to epidemiology and climatology in order to try to determine why and how evolution took the course that it did.
I became interested in the specific problem of the evolution of human skin color quite by accident when, in 1991, I was asked by a colleague to give a lecture on skin. Realizing that little was known about why skin color variation existed in humans and that new data existed to shed light on the mystery, I embarked on what I thought would be a short excursion into this area of research. Nearly 20 years and many serendipitous discoveries later, the biological and social meaning of skin color has grown to be one of the main foci of research, because of its many ramifications for human health and the quality of human interactions. My research on the evolution of human skin and skin color has been done mostly in collaboration with my husband, George Chaplin. Together we have demonstrated that skin color is the product of natural selection acting to regulate levels of melanin pigment in the skin relative to levels of ultraviolet radiation (UVR) in the environment. Melanin is a natural sunscreen that prevents the breakdown of certain essential biomolecules (in particular, the B vitamin folate, and DNA), while permitting enough UVR to enter the skin to promote the production of essential vitamin D. This research led to my being awarded in 2005 one of the first Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowships ("Guggenheims for race"), in addition to the 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship.
I am committed to bringing science to the public. In 2006, I published the book, Skin: A Natural History (University of California Press), that examined the evolutionary history and cultural importance of skin. I am now working on another book, on the biological and social meaning of skin color. In addition to books and popular articles, I enjoy giving lectures and interviews on human evolution. Many of these are now available in various formats on the internet. I have also collaborated on many scientific documentaries on human and primate evolution for American, European, and Asian television networks.
In 2023, Nina Jablonski becaame an Atherton Professor and Evan Pugh University Professor of Anthropology Emerita at Pennsylvania State University. | |
| 29 | Name: | Dr. Daniel H. Janzen | | | Institution: | University of Pennsylvania; Area de Conservación Gaunacaste, Costa Rica | | | Year Elected: | 2007 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1939 | | | | | | |
Daniel Janzen is DiMaura Professor of Conservation Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and Technical Advisor to the Area de Conservación Gaunacaste in northwestern Costa Rica. While initially focused on tropical animal-plant relationships, from the early 1980's to the present, Janzen has focused on an inventory of tropical caterpillars, their parasites, and their microbial biodiversity, and on the conservation of tropical biodiversity through its non-damaging development (see ). His 428 publications encapsulate much of this information and its associated relevance for tropical science administration and conservation biology. He and his biologist wife, Winnie Hallwachs, are among the primary architects of the Area de Conservación Gaunacaste (ACG) in northwestern Costa Rica (), which was decreed a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999. Janzen received the first Crafoord Prize in biology offered xby the Swedish Royal Academy of Science (1984), the Kyoto Prize in Basic Biology (1997), and the John Scott Award of the City of Philadelphia for activities good for humankind (2003). A member of the US National Academy of Sciences (1992) and the Costa Rican National Academy of Sciences (2002), his activities have had a positive influence on society's awareness of the relevance and potential of conservation of tropical wildland biodiversity for global understanding, national sustainable development, and individual quality of life, both inside and outside the tropics. His current focus is caterpillar natural history, the combination of conservation and biodiversity development, finding the funds to endow the entire national park system of Costa Rica, and facilitating global bioliteracy through the emergence of the ability of all people to be able to identify any organism anywhere anytime through DNA barcoding. | |
| 30 | Name: | Dr. J. Steve Jones | | | Institution: | University College London | | | Year Elected: | 2011 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1944 | | | | | | |
Steve Jones is a geneticist whose research, primarily concerned with snails and the light their anatomy can shed on biodiversity and genetics, has led to the publication of over 100 specialist papers. He also does more than his share of university teaching and administration, but his main contribution is in the popularization of science. Jones is one of the best known contemporary writers on evolution, and in 1996 he won the Royal Society’s Michael Faraday Prize “for his numerous, wide ranging contributions to the public understanding of science in areas such as human evolution and variation, race, sex, inherited disease and genetic manipulation through his many broadcasts on radio and television, his lectures, popular science books, and his regular science column in The Daily Telegraph and contributions to other newspaper media.” Jones combines profundity with wit, as the APS members who attended his two lectures in the UK in June/July 2009 can attest. His publications include: The Language of the Genes, 1993; (S. Jones, et al) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution, 1994; In the Blood: God, Genes and Destiny, 1997; Almost Like a Whale: The Origin of Species Updated, 1999; Darwin’s Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated, 2000; Y: The Descent of Men, 2003; (with B. Van Loon) Introducing Genetics, 2005; Coral, 2007; and Darwin’s Island, 2009. In addition to the Faraday Prize, he has been awarded the Institute of Biology Charter Medal (2002) and the Thomson Reuters Award of the Zoological Society of London (2009). He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 1971. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2011. | |
| 31 | Name: | Dr. Meave Leakey | | | Institution: | Stony Brook University | | | Year Elected: | 2017 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | | | | |
I have always had an interest in natural history and rocks, a pastime much encouraged by my parents. After completing my Zoology degree at the University of North Wales in 1965, I was invited by Louis Leakey to work at the Tigoni Primate Research Centre outside Nairobi, Kenya. Here, in my limited spare time and under the supervision of the animal mechanics specialist Prof. McNeil Alexander, at the University of North Wales my limited spare time, I studied the forelimbs of modern cercopithecoids in the excellent collections of the research centre. I completed my PhD in 1968. In 1969, I began working with Richard Leakey exploring the extensive area of fossiliferous deposits on the eastern shores of Lake Turkana, northern Kenya, which at that time had never before been prospected for fossils or archaeological remains. The Koobi For a Research Project (KFRP) field research has continued to this day, initially under Richard Leakey, after 1989 under my leadership, and more recently co-led with my daughter Louise. The fifty years of fieldwork in the Turkana Basin, exploring the thousands of square kilometers of exposed fossiliferous sediments for evidence of origins of our past, has resulted in large paleontological collections documenting much of the Neogene, but is particularly well known for laying the foundation of our current knowledge of our own evolutionary past.
Today, together with Louise, I continue to direct the KFRP annual field expeditions. In 1995 the project recovered and named Australopithecus anamensis, the earliest known australopithecine, and the earliest secure evidence of bipedality. In 1999, we discovered and named Kenyanthropus platyops, showing diversity in humanity's past 3.5 million years ago. Sponsored by the National Geographic Society, the KFRP continues to recover new fossils showing diversity in the human family tree even earlier in time. Working with numerous colleagues from many disciplines, I have published widely. I am a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, a Research Professor at Stony Brook University and Director of Field Research at the Turkana Basin Institute (TBI), an interdisciplinary research institute with stations to the east and west of Lake Turkana. In addition to promoting and facilitating research, TBI provides training and research opportunities, and brings employment and development benefits to local communities, while increasing awareness among the local people of their unique prehistoric heritage in this vast area. My awards include: The Academy of Achievements Award, USA in 2004, my election as an Honorary Fellow of the Geological Society of London, 2011, as a Foreign Associate National Academy of Sciences 2013, and as a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences 2013. In 2014, I was awarded the National Geographic Society Hubbard Medal. A large part of my successes are due to the invaluable support and efforts of the hard working KFRP field crew, my many colleagues and my wonderful family.
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Meave Leakey is also the author of The Sediments of Time which was published in 2020. | |
| 32 | Name: | Dr. Leif Andersson | | | Institution: | Uppsala University; Texas A&M University | | | Year Elected: | 2017 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1954 | | | | | | |
Leif Andersson is the world’s leading authority on the genomic study of the origin and selected traits of domestic animals, and for his pioneering work he received the prestigious international Wolf Prize in 2014. He has repeatedly discovered what happens genetically when animal breeders apply artificial selection to domestic animals and choose particular traits for enhancement. These traits include fat deposition in pigs, the color of wattles and skin in chickens, and coat coloration and gait locomotion in horses. Genetic understanding has aided further selection programs. This work is the best modern manifestation of Charles Darwin’s pioneering study of Variation under Domestication. Truly Darwinian in outlook, Leif Andersson has expanded his genomic research program into problems of understanding evolution in nature, including the breeding of Baltic Sea herring, the size of rabbits, the peculiar mating system of a colorful shorebird, and size and shape of the beaks of Darwin’s finches. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2018. | |
| 33 | Name: | Dr. Jonathan B. Losos | | | Institution: | Washington University in St. Louis | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1961 | | | | | | |
Jonathan Losos is an evolutionary biologist known for his research on how lizards rapidly evolve to adapt to changing environments. He graduated from Harvard University and received his PhD from the University of California. After a postdoctoral stint at the University of California Davis, Jonathan moved to Washington University for his first faculty position, before leaving to become a professor of biology at Harvard and Curator in Herpetology at the university’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. He then returned to Washington University in 2018 to become the founding Director of the Living Earth Collaborative, a partnership between Washington University, the Saint Louis Zoo and the Missouri Botanical Garden. This new biodiversity center, nearly unique in partnering a leading university, zoo, and garden, has as its mission to advance knowledge and conservation of biodiversity. Losos has written more than 250 scientific papers and three books, most recently The Cat’s Meow: How Cats Evolved from the Savanna to Your Sofa (Penguin Random House, 2017), and is an author of a leading college biology textbook (Raven et al., Biology). Losos has been elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and is the recipient of the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences, the Theodosius Dobzhansky Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution, the Edward O. Wilson Naturalist Award from the American Society of Naturalists, and the David Starr Jordan Prize. | |
| 34 | Name: | Dr. Ernst Mayr | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 1965 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1904 | | | Death Date: | February 3, 2005 | | | | |
| 35 | Name: | Dr. Giuseppe Montalenti | | | Institution: | University of Rome | | | Year Elected: | 1985 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1904 | | | Death Date: | 7/2/90 | | | | |
| 36 | Name: | Dr. Norman D. Newell | | | Institution: | Columbia University& American Museum of Natural History | | | Year Elected: | 1971 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1909 | | | Death Date: | April 18, 2005 | | | | |
| 37 | Name: | Dr. Ruth Patrick | | | Institution: | Academy of Natural Sciences | | | Year Elected: | 1974 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1907 | | | Death Date: | September 23, 2013 | | | | | | |
Ruth Patrick was a world-renowned scientist who had studied the waterways of South Carolina for more than fifty years. Born in Topeka, Kansas, she learned to share her father's love for nature and microscopic plant life. From there she moved to South Carolina and in 1929 earned a bachelor's degree from Coker College in Hartsville. In 1934, she earned a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. In the early 1950s, she was assigned by the Atomic Energy Commission to collect baseline data on the water quality and biota of the Savannah River prior to the opening of the Savannah River Plant. Dr. Patrick responded by forming a team of scientists from the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences to study the area. She was the first scientist to diagnose the health of a river or stream by plant life and animal species. Her early studies contributed significantly to the developing field of ecology and established for the first time a set of aquatic indices that could be used to describe the health of water systems and the impact of industrialization. Her work has since been modeled by ecologists worldwide. Dr. Patrick's career had been marked with many awards and accomplishments. She held the Francis Boyer Chair of Limnology at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. She received the Award of Merit from the Botanical Society of America in 1971, the Eminent Ecologist Award from the Ecological Society of America in 1972, and the Gold Medal of the Royal Zoological Society of Belgium in 1978. In 1970, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and in 1974 to the American Philosophical Society. In 1989 Dr. Patrick was awarded an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Science by the University of South Carolina and in 1996 she was inducted into the South Carolina Hall of Science and Technology. She also served on the Wistar Institute's board of trustees for more than three decades and was a trustee emerita. Ruth Patrick was awarded the American Philosophical Society's Benjamin Franklin Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Sciences in 1993. The citation read "in recognition of her study of diatoms, microscopic species of algae, which helped make her one of the world's most distinguished biologists; and developing extraordinarly useful ways of monitoring water pollution." Ruth Patrick died September 23, 2013, at age 105 in Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania. | |
| 38 | Name: | Dr. David M. Raup | | | Institution: | University of Chicago | | | Year Elected: | 2002 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1933 | | | Death Date: | July 9, 2015 | | | | | | |
David Raup was a paleontologist specializing in synoptic studies of fossil marine invertebrate animals. His research included biocyrstallography of echinoderm skeletons, modeling and simulation of growth and form in mollusks, and analysis of large data bases from the Phanerozoic fossil record with emphasis on the role of extinction in the history of life. His honors and awards included the Paleontological Society Medal and Schuchert Award and membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He had approximately 200 research papers to his credit as well as a textbook, Principles of Paleontology (with S.M. Stanley), and two trade books: The Nemesis Affair and Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? Dr. Raup held a B.Sc. from the University of Chicago and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. He was Sewell L. Avery Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. Before joining the University of Chicago faculty, he taught at Caltech, Johns Hopkins and the University of Rochester and served as curator and Dean of Science at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. David Raup died July 9, 2015, at age 82 in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. | |
| 39 | Name: | Dr. Peter Hamilton Raven | | | Institution: | Missouri Botanical Garden & Washington University | | | Year Elected: | 1988 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1936 | | | | | | |
Peter H. Raven is one of the world's leading botanists and advocates of conservation and biodiversity. For four decades, he headed the Missouri Botanical Garden, an institution he nurtured into a world-class center for botanical research and education, and horticultural display. He retired as president in 2010 and assumed the role of president emeritus and consultant through 2014. Described by Time magazine as a "Hero for the Planet," Raven champions research around the world to preserve endangered plants and is a leading advocate for conservation and a sustainable environment.
In recognition of his work in science and conservation, Raven is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards, including the 2003 Japanese Cosmos Award, the prestigious International Prize for Biology from the government of Japan and the U.S. National Medal of Science, the country's highest award for scientific accomplishment. He has held Guggenheim and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowships.
Raven was a member of President Bill Clinton's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology. He also served for 12 years as home secretary of the National Academy of Sciences and is a member of the academies of science in Argentina, Brazil, China, Denmark, India, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Sweden, the U.K., and several other countries. The author of numerous books and reports, both popular and scientific, Raven co-wrote Biology of Plants, an internationally best-selling textbook, now in its sixth edition. He also co-authored Environment, a leading textbook on the environment. | |
| 40 | Name: | Dr. Dolph Schluter | | | Institution: | University of British Columbia | | | Year Elected: | 2024 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1955 | | | | | | |
Dolph Schluter received his BSc in ecology in 1977 from the University of Guelph, Ontario, and his PhD in 1983 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, under the supervision of Peter R. Grant (elected to APS 1991). For his PhD thesis, Schluter studied ecological mechanisms driving assembly and evolution of island assemblages of Darwin's finch species. He and an assistant spent nearly two years living in a tent on remote and otherwise uninhabited Galápagos islands collecting field data. Schluter’s work on the finches culminated in the first estimates from nature of “adaptive landscapes” (mean fitness functions), which successfully predicted mean beak sizes of Galápagos ground finches on islands. He was able to compare these landscapes to fitness functions from survival data on natural selection, using a method he also pioneered, and to test evolutionary shifts caused by interspecific competition between species. This work was a key component of the long-term study of the Darwin's finches that is regarded as the most successful ever field study of evolution. Schluter obtained a tenure track position at UBC in 1989, where he played a steering role in building one of the world’s strongest research groups in biodiversity science.
Between 1983 and 1990 Schluter studied the evolution of continental bird assemblages, during which he developed methods to estimate convergence between faunas. This work led to a collaboration with R. E. Ricklefs that produced a highly influential coedited volume on global patterns of species diversity (Chicago, 1993). Schluter’s group continued to work on the evolution of the latitudinal gradient in species diversity. They showed, surprisingly, that speciation rates are often as higher or higher in the temperate zone, where few species are present, than in the much more species-rich tropics. This finding has since been confirmed by numerous other researchers.
In the late 1980’s, Schluter initiated work on threespine stickleback fish in BC, which enabled his landmark experimental and comparative studies on mechanisms driving the origin and divergence of new species. This work yielded advances on many significant research problems in adaptive radiation, and his stickleback species pairs have become one of the best-known natural study systems in evolutionary biology. The work inspired many ideas, culminating in his now classic text, "The Ecology of Adaptive Radiation" (Oxford, 2000). His subsequent collaboration with D. Kingsley and C. Peichel led to the discovery of key genes underlying species differences and made the stickleback a “supermodel” for studies of adaptive genetic variation. He continues to work on the ecology and genetics of adaptation and speciation in stickleback.
Research Interests
I investigate recent adaptive radiation, whereby a single ancestor diversifies rapidly into an array of species that inhabit a variety of environments and that differ in traits used to exploit those environments. I am especially interested in the selection pressures that drive the origin of new species, the ecological interactions that lead to the evolution of species differences, the genetic basis of these differences, and the wider impacts of diversification on ecosystems. I addressed these questions initially in field studies of Darwin’s finches, but over recent decades I have developed for study a natural system having many advantages for experimental study, the threespine sticklebacks of fresh water and coastal marine areas of British Columbia. My work has included the quantitative estimation of natural selection surfaces and ancestral traits, the experimental study of species interactions, natural selection and evolution, and the discovery of genes underlying phenotypic differences between populations and species and their fitness consequences. My second interest is the role of evolutionary processes and historical events in the development and maintenance of Earth's major biodiversity gradients. | |
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