Class
| • | 2. Biological Sciences | [X] |
| | 1 | Name: | Dr. John C. Avise | | | Institution: | University of California, Irvine; University of Georgia | | | Year Elected: | 2011 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 207. Genetics | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1948 | | | | | | |
John C. Avise
I am a naturalist at heart, a geneticist by training, and my career has been devoted to wedding these two arenas. After obtaining a B.S. degree in Fish Biology at the University of Michigan, I went on to earn a M.A. in Zoology from the University of Texas and a Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of California at Davis. My graduate training came at a time when molecular approaches were being introduced to population genetics, and I began to see that molecular markers could open the entire biological world for genetic scrutiny. Ever since then my students and I have used molecular markers to analyze the natural histories and evolution of wild animals. Topics that we have studied range from micro-evolutionary to macro-evolutionary: genetic parentage and mating systems, geographic population structure, gene flow, hybridization, biogeography, speciation, systematics, and phylogenetics. We have conducted research on diverse vertebrate and invertebrate animals from marine, freshwater, and terrestrial environments. Our typical goal is to unveil behavioral or evolutionary features of organisms, but we also aim to elucidate genetic and evolutionary properties of protein and DNA molecules. The theory and practice of evolutionary genetics are relevant to ecological issues and conservation biology, two areas that provide themes for much of our research. Although I am the acknowledged 'father of phylogeography', I like to think of myself as a broader pioneer in molecular ecology, molecular evolution, and conservation genetics. In addition to hundreds of scientific articles, I have published 20 books on subjects ranging from the science-religion interface to genetic engineering, natural history, molecular ecology, evolution, biogeography, phylogenetics, reproductive modes, educational outreach, and roles for humor in science. | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Marcus William Feldman | | | Institution: | Stanford University; Xi'an Jiaotong University, China | | | Year Elected: | 2011 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | | | | |
Marcus Feldman is Director of the Morrison Institute for Population and Resource Studies and Burnet C. and Mildred Finley Wohlford Professor of Biology at Stanford University, and Director of the Center for Complexity Studies, Xi'an Jiaotong University, China.
Marcus Feldman’s contributions to evolutionary theory include over four-hundred fifty refereed publications and nine books, mentoring over fifty doctoral and postdoctoral students, including fifteen women from fourteen countries, who remain in academia today and who constitute a truly dominant worldwide force in evolutionary studies, and his application of evolutionary analysis to important social problems.
Early in his career, Feldman became a leader in the study of natural selection acting on many genes simultaneously, i.e., multilocus selection. He used this as a basis for his famous studies on the evolution of genes that control important influences on the evolution of other genes, namely the evolution of mutation, recombination, and migration. His analytical framework remains the gold standard for quantitative studies of modifier genes, for example in the evolution of sex.
With Cavalli-Sforza, Feldman originated the quantitative study of cultural evolution and gene-culture co-adaptation. Largely due to Feldman’s rigorous approach to this theory, it is now a major component of anthropological theory and behavioral economics. The mathematical and statistical approach that Feldman originated has been incorporated into such diverse fields as the evolution of lactose tolerance, the advantage of learning in changing environments, and heritability of intelligence. With colleagues in China, Feldman applied his theory of cultural coevolution to a major problem in Chinese demography, the excess of male births and the cultural preference for sons. His projections for future sex ratios, made using his models of cultural transmission and evolution, have led to major administrative programs aimed at alleviating the shortage of females.
In the field of human genomics since 2001, Feldman has spearheaded the work on DNA polymorphisms, showing the central importance of ancient human migrations to the present pattern of human genomic variation. He has used this work to further his career-long fight against the use of genetics to justify racism.
Over the past fifteen years, working with colleague Odling-Smee and former postdoctoral fellow Kevin Laland, Feldman has developed the quantitative theory of niche construction. This theory extends standard evolutionary theory by allowing the inheritance of organisms’ environments, introducing a complex pattern of feedbacks between genetic and environmental evolution. These feedbacks produce evolutionary dynamics not seen in standard evolutionary theory but which can describe how environmental effects of human culture can affect human genetic evolution. In 2011 Feldman was honored as the Dan David laureat for his work in evolution. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2011. | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy | | | Institution: | University of California, Davis | | | Year Elected: | 2011 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 205. Microbiology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1946 | | | | | | |
Sarah Blaffer Hrdy graduated summa cum laude from Radcliffe College and earned her PhD at Harvard in 1975. Currently she is professor emerita in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She has been elected to the California Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the sole author of five books including The Woman That Never Evolved (1981), Mother Nature (1999), and Mothers and Others: The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding (2009) as well as co-editor of Infanticide: Comparative and Evolutionary Perspectives and Attachment and Bonding: A New Synthesis. Her current focus is on how evolutionary perspectives can help us better understand the needs of children. She and her husband, a medical doctor, have three children and currently combine growing walnuts with habitat restoration on their farm in northern California (which can be found at www.citrona.com). In 2014 she was received the NAS Award for Scientific Publishing. | |
| 4 | Name: | Dr. William T. Newsome | | | Institution: | Stanford University; Howard Hughes Medical Institute | | | Year Elected: | 2011 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 208. Plant Sciences | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1952 | | | | | | |
William T. Newsome is Harman Family Provostial Professor, Vincent V. C. Woo Director of the Stanford Neurosciences Institute, Professor of Neurobiology and, by courtesy, of Psychology, Stanford University. In 2013 he was enlisted to co-lead the working group for President Obama's $100 million BRAIN initiative.
Studying the primate visual system with a combination of behavioral, electrophysiological, and computational techniques, William Newsome has provided a deep understanding of the neural mechanisms mediating basic cognitive functions, including motion perception and decision. The most compelling evidence for the relationship between the response of individual neurons and perception has come from Newsome’s work. Newsome and colleagues recorded the activity of motion selective neurons in area MT in alert monkeys while the animals carried out a task designed to report the direction of motion in a random dot display. They found that the firing of most neurons in this task correlated extremely well with the performance of the monkey. Thus, directional information encoded by the neurons of a single column in MT is sufficient to account for the subject’s judgment. They then found that stimulation altered the animal’s judgment, biasing judgments toward the particular direction of motion encoded by the neurons that were stimulated. Thus, the firing of a relatively small population of motion sensitive neurons in MT, perhaps as few as 200, directly contributes to perception.
He earned his Ph.D. in 1980 from the California Institute of Technology. He has won a number of awards, including the W. Alden Spencer Award from Columbia University in 1994, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association in 2002, and the Karl Spencer Lashley Award from the American Philosophical Society in 2010. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2000 and the American Philosophical Society in 2011. | |
| 5 | Name: | Dr. Olufunmilayo Olopade | | | Institution: | University of Chicago | | | Year Elected: | 2011 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 204. Medicine, Surgery, Pathology and Immunology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1957 | | | | | | |
Olufunmilayo Olopade occupies a unique place in medicine. Born and educated in Nigeria, where she earned her M.D. from the University of Ibadan in 1980, she has been on the faculty of University of Chicago since 1986. She specializes in cancer risk assessment prevention, early detection and treatment of aggressive breast cancer that disproportionately affects young women. Olopade has done pioneering work in genomic analysis of breast cancer, including seminal work in young Nigerian breast cancer patients harboring BRCA1 and BRCA2 variants. This work in comparative genomics has the potential to reduce the burden of cancer and improve health in developing nations. She has been recognized with many honors, including the Distinguished Clinical Scientist Award of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation in 2000, a MacArthur Fellowship in 2005, and the 2017 Mendel Medal Lecture at Villanova University. She is a member of a number of scholarly communities, including the American Association for Cancer Research, the Association of American Physicians (2005), the National Academy of Sciences (2008), the Institute of Medicine (2008), and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2010). She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2011. | |
| 6 | Name: | Dr. Keith S. Thomson | | | Institution: | American Philosophical Society; University of Oxford | | | Year Elected: | 2011 | | | Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 203. Evolution & Ecology, Systematics, Population Genetics, Paleontology, and Physical Anthropology | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1938 | | | | | | |
Keith Stewart Thomson served as the American Philosophical Society’s Executive Officer from July 1, 2012, to June 12, 2017. He graduated from the University of Birmingham (UK) in 1960 and then moved to Harvard University, earning a Ph.D. in biology in 1963. His dissertation was on the evolution of air-breathing at the transition between fishes and the first land animals.
He continued to study both fossil and living fishes when he returned to England as NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at University College London (1963-1965) before going to Yale University (1965-1987), first as a faculty member of the Biology Department, where he was also appointed Curator of Fishes in the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and later as its Director and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. At Yale his studies of ancient fishes inevitably drew him both to the “living fossil” lungfishes and the extraordinary living coelacanth. In 1966 he obtained for study the first fresh specimen of the coelacanth from the Comoro Islands (Living Fossil, 1991). His overall goal was to understand fossils in the same physiological, biomechanical, and ecological terms as we study living animals. In the process he published more than 200 papers on subjects ranging from the evolution of cell size and DNA content in lungfish and intracranial mechanics in the coelacanth and its fossil relatives, to the origin of the tetrapod middle ear and the body shape and swimming mechanics of sharks. From an early interest in embryology, it was but a short step to study the roles that developmental processes play in evolution, and to writing Morphogenesis and Evolution (1988). As an evolutionary biologist he naturally became interested in Charles Darwin and that led to a broader interest in the history of science (for example HMS Beagle, the Story of Darwin’s Ship, 1995).
He moved to Philadelphia as President and CEO of the Academy of Natural Sciences (1987-1995), which included heading a successful capital campaign for a new library building and a research laboratory on Chesapeake Bay. In 1996 he was appointed University Distinguished Scientist-in-Residence at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where he introduced the first science curriculum and taught both biology and history of science. In 1998 he was elected to be the first director (in modern times) of the Oxford University Museum, Professor of Natural History, and a Fellow of Kellogg College. At Oxford he was heavily involved in the creation of a new national program of funding for regional (i.e. not state-funded) museums. After retiring in 2003 he returned to Philadelphia to write, and was based at the American Philosophical Society as Senior Research Fellow. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2011.
His recent books include: The Watch on the Heath (published in the USA as Before Darwin) and Fossils: a Very Short Introduction, both in 2005; The Legacy of the Mastodon (2008); A Passion for Nature: Thomas Jefferson and Natural History (2008); The Young Charles Darwin (2009); Jefferson’s Shadow: The Story of his Science (2012), and Private Doubt, Public Dilemma (2015). | |
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