Encyclopedia of Biodiversity

Simon A. Levin is the Moffett Professor of Biology at Princeton University and the Director of the Center for BioComplexity in the Princeton Environmental Institute. Previously he was the Alexander Professor of Biology at Cornell University, Director of Cornell’s Center for Environmental Research, and the Princeton Environmental Institute. He has served as President of the Ecological Society of America and of the Society for Mathematical Biology. His principal research interests are in understanding how macroscopic patterns and processes are maintained at the level of ecosystems, socioeconomic systems, and the biosphere, in terms of ecological, behavioral and evolutionary mechanisms that operate primarily at the level of organisms. Levin is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and a Foreign Member of the Istituto Veneto. He is a University Fellow of Resources for the Future, a Fellow of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, and a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He has nearly 500 publications, and is the Editor of the Encyclopedia of Biodiversity and the Princeton Guide to Ecology. He serves on the Science Board of the Santa Fe Institute, which he co-chaired from 2007-2010, and was formerly Chair of the Council of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. Levin’s awards include: the Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences, Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, Margalef Prize for Ecology, the Ecological Society of America’s MacArthur and Eminent Ecologist Awards, and the Okubo Award of the Society for Mathematical Biology and the Japanese Society for Theoretical Biology