| 1 | Name: | Dr. Peter R. Grant | |
| Institution: | Princeton University | ||
| Year Elected: | 1991 | ||
| Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1936 | ||
A key figure in modern evolutionary biology, Peter R. Grant is most interested in ecology, evolution and behavior. He specializes in the finches of the Galapagos Islands that were originally studied by Charles Darwin and has conducted long-term studies of individual finch populations on some of the smaller islands. He has been able to show that, even over a space of time as short as 15 years, there have been numerous climate changes which have led to clear evidence of natural selection influencing and modifying the genetically determined physical characteristics of the indiviudal finches within a population. With numerous publications to his credit, Dr. Grant has been a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University since 1985. He was educated at the University of Cambridge, the University of British Columbia and Yale University and previously taught at McGill University and the University of Michigan. He has received awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1985-86), an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (1996) and the American Ornithologists' Union's Brewster Medal (1983). He is a fellow of the Royal Society of London (1987), the Royal Society of Canada and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1997) and a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences (2007). He has also shared numerous awards with his wife, fellow evolutionary ecologist Rosemary Grant. These include the Academy of Natural Science's Leidy Medal (1994), the E.O. Wilson Prize of the American Society of Naturalists (1998), the Darwin Medal for Evolutionary Biology (2003), the A.I.B.S. Outstanding Scientist Award (2005), the Balzan Prize in Population Biology (2005), the Linnean Society of London's Darwin-Wallace Medal (2008), the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation (2009), the Royal Medal in Biology from the Royal Society of London (2017), and the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2017) | |||