Eight University of California faculty members are among 12 new members of the Academy Fellows of the California Academy of Sciences. The new fellows will be inducted during the Oct. 12 meeting of the fellowship.
The Oct. 12 meeting also will mark the presentation of the Fellows' Medal, which this year goes to Marvalee Wake of UC Berkeley. The award is given annually to an especially prominent scientist who has made outstanding contributions to his or her scientific field.
New fellows include:
- James R. Carey, Department of Entomology, UC Davis
Carey is professor and the former vice-chair in the Department of Entomology, specializing in invasion biology and insect biodemography. His research interests in aging and longevity include the use of tephritid fruit flies (medfly) and other insect species (butterflies; Drosophila) to address questions concerning life span limits, effects of dietary and caloric restriction on longevity, male-female mortality differentials and the gender gap, aging in the wild, behavioral gerontology, dynamics of morbidity and mortality, and the biology and demography of disability. He is the author of "Applied Demography for Biologists and Longevity," and the author or coauthor of over 165 scientific publications, 10 of which have appeared in the journal Science. - Gregory S. Gilbert, Department of Environmental Studies, UC Santa Cruz
Gilbert is professor of Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz and research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama. His primary areas of research include applied evolutionary ecology, plant disease ecology, tropical forest ecology, phylogenetic community ecology, and cross-cultural science education. His long-term goal is to understand what shapes the structure and composition of fungal and plant communities in natural ecosystems, and to apply that understanding to conservation practice. He serves as co-director of CenTREAD (the Center for Tropical Research in Ecology, Agriculture and Development) and also developed the UC Santa Cruz Forest Ecology Research Plot, a 6-ha mapped forest site in the Campus Natural Reserve. - Gary B. Griggs, Department of Earth and Planetary Science, UC Santa Cruz
A distinguished professor of Earth and planetary sciences and director of the Institute of Marine Sciences since 1991, Griggs is an expert on coastal processes and geologic hazards. His research is focused on the coastal zone and ranges from coastal evolution and development, through shoreline processes, coastal engineering and coastal hazards. Recent research projects have focused on documenting and understanding shoreline erosion processes including temporal and spatial variations in rates of retreat; evaluating the effectiveness of coastal protection structures and the impacts of coastal engineering projects (seawalls, jetties, breakwaters) on coastal processes and beaches; evaluating littoral processes-the mechanisms which move sediment along high energy rocky coastlines; and quantifying littoral cell budgets. He has published several books, among them the classic "Living with the Changing California Coast." - Eileen A. Lacey, Department of Integrative Biology, UC Berkeley
Lacey is a specialist in mammalian social behavior, with an emphasis on rodents. She came to UC Berkeley in 1996 and holds joint appointments in Integrative Biology and the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. Her research explores the evolution of behavioral diversity among vertebrates, with emphasis on studies of mammals. By combining field studies of behavior, ecology and demography with molecular genetic analyses of kinship and population structure, she seeks to identify the causes and consequences of variation in mammalian social behavior. - Matthew R. Lewin, School of Medicine, UCSF
As an emergency medicine physician, Lewin is interested in "wilderness medicine" — accident and illness during travel to remote and extreme environments where resources are few and assistance is often far away. Lewin has participated in many scientific fieldwork expeditions and has just completed a study of illness and injury occurring during six scientific expeditions to the Gobi Desert regions in the Republic of Mongolia and Inner Mongolia. Lewin teaches emergency and field medicine at UCSF and holds appointments at UCSF and Stanford University. He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles in scientific and medical journals. - Bruce E. Lyon, Department of Biological Sciences, UC Santa Cruz
Lyon's research seeks to understand the ecological and evolutionary basis of reproductive strategies and social behavior in animals, particularly reproductive parasitism, parental care and mating systems. One focus is to understand patterns of cooperation and reproductive parasitism in birds and insects. Lyon is interested in understanding these links and identifying the ecological and social factors that promote parasitic versus cooperative reproductive behaviors. Communication through social signals is an important aspect of social evolution, and a second research interest is to understand the evolutionary dynamics of these signals and, in particular, determine the degree to which social signals are cooperative versus deceptive. - Grant Pogson, Department of Biological Sciences, UC Santa Cruz
Pogson is professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC Santa Cruz. His research is focused on using patterns of DNA sequence variation to study adaptation and speciation in the marine environment. He uses coalescent approaches involving a combination of neutral and selected genes to investigate how natural selection, population structure, and historical demography can affect polymorphism within species and the divergence between species. One of Pogson's principal aims is to understand how reproductive barriers evolve in highly dispersive species inhabiting broad geographic ranges. His research involves both marine fishes (primarily the Atlantic cod) and invertebrates (mussels and urchins) distributed throughout the world's north temperate oceans. - Peter C. Wainwright, Department of Evolution and Ecology, UC Davis
Wainwright is a comparative functional morphologist interested in the origins and consequences of functional diversity, and he is broadly interested in the evolution of organismal design. His work focuses on the feeding mechanisms of teleost fishes as a model system in the evolution of muscle-skeleton systems and the behaviors they are used to perform. His research seeks to identify general patterns, repeating themes, and principles of how the complex muscle-skeleton system of fishes is modified during evolution to produce the diversity we see in function and ecology.
2010 Fellows Medalist
Marvalee Wake, recipient of the 2010 Fellows Medal, is professor of the Graduate School in the Department of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley. Her research interests include evolutionary morphology, development, and reproductive biology in vertebrates. She is former president of the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) and the International Union for Biological Sciences (IUBS) and has served on the Smithsonian Science Commission, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Board on Sustainable Development, and several National Science Foundation advisory committees and task forces. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was a Guggenheim Fellow (1988-89) and a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2002). She has taught at UC Berkeley for 35 years, and was assistant and associate dean of the College of Letters and Science, chair of the departments of Zoology and Integrative Biology, and was Chancellors Professor of Integrative Biology.
The California Academy of Sciences, located in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, is an international center for scientific education and research and is at the forefront of efforts to understand and protect the diversity of Earth's living things. The Academy has a staff of over 50 professional educators and Ph.D.-level scientists, supported by more than 100 Research and Field Associates and over 300 Fellows. It conducts research in 11 scientific fields: anthropology, aquatic biology, botany, comparative genomics, entomology, geology, herpetology, ichthyology, invertebrate zoology, mammalogy and ornithology.