Ecologist Priyanga Amarasekare wins Robert H. MacArthur Award

by Stuart Wolpert, University of California, Los Angeles
April 27, 2022

Priyanga Amarasekare, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the UCLA College, has won the Robert H. MacArthur Award from the Ecological Society of America. The award is given to a midcareer ecologist for outstanding contributions to the field. It is given to one person every two years.

Amarasekare’s work “is simultaneously broad and deep and has important effects on every area it touches, from coexistence theory to climate change,” according to the society. “Like Robert MacArthur, she has demonstrated exceptional ability in identifying maximally simple, yet not simplistic, models to achieve new insights on important ecological problems. She is able to see patterns or problems in nature and build models that unravel and explain those observations mechanistically and elegantly, and in the context of evolution.”

Keep reading: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/dept/faculty/ecologist-priyanga-amarasekare-wins-robert-macarthur-award

Read ESA’s press release: https://www.esa.org/blog/2022/04/19/ecological-society-of-america-announces-2022-award-recipients/