Biologist Sir Robert May To Lecture At Institute For Advanced Study

Sir Robert May, current president of Britain's Royal Society, and former Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Government and Head of the UK Office of Science and Technology, will speak on "Unanswered Questions in Ecology" at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, May 2 in Wolfensohn Hall on the campus of the Institute for Advanced Study. The event is part of the Institute's Public Lecture Series in Biology. A reception in the Common Room of Fuld Hall will follow the lecture.

May studies various aspects of the way populations and communities are structured, and how they respond to change, both natural and human-induced. The talk, he says, "will be a personal view of what I think are some of the most important unanswered questions in ecology. The list is organized hierarchically, focussing primarily on questions at the level of individual populations, but progressing through interacting populations to entire communities of ecosystems. I will sketch both possible advances in basic knowledge and potential applications."

A native of Australia, May received his bachelor's degree in 1956 from Sydney University and his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1959 from the same institution.

After teaching at Harvard University, he was Professor of Physics at Sydney University (1962-1973). At Sydney, he was appointed in 1969 to the first Personal Chair, created for individuals "of great distinction, for whom no vacant Chair or Establishment exists." A member of the Institute for Advanced Study's School of Natural Sciences in 1971-72, he was professor of biology and, later, Class of 1877 Professor of Zoology at Princeton University, from 1973 to1988, when he was named Royal Society Research Professor at Oxford University and Imperial College, London.

In 1996 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded May the Crafoord Prize in the biosciences, with emphasis on ecology; the Crafoord Prize was established for basic research in fields not covered by the Nobel prizes.

In his position as Chief Scientific Advisor to the British government (1995-2000), May was deeply involved in many topics at the intersection of biology and public policy, ranging from debates over biodiversity to the epidemiology of AIDS.

In addition to being a Fellow of the Royal Society, cited for "many contributions to theoretical ecology, including especially the concept of chaos and the clarification of the relations between stability and complexity," May is a Foreign Member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Among numerous other positions, he chairs the board of trustees of the Natural History Museum, London, and has served on the British Cabinet's Advisory Council on Science and Technology, as well as the Advisory Council for the Smithsonian Institution. A past trustee of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, and the World Wide Fund for Nature (UK), he holds honorary degrees from a number of institutions, including Princeton, Yale, and Uppsala universities.

The lecture, sponsored by the Institute's Program in Theoretical Biology, is free and open to the public.