Jonathan Losos

Losos studied biology at Harvard University, from which he received a Bachelor's degree in 1984. Later on, in 1989, he received a PhD in Zoology from the University of California, Berkeley (Ecomorphological Adaptation in the Genus Anolis). Starting in 1987, he worked as a Teaching assistant in Berkeley, afterwards, starting in 1990, he began his research as a Postdoctoral student at the University of California, Davis. Losos then, from 1992 on, was Assistant professor at the Washington University in St. Louis, and then moved on to be Associate professor in 1997, and Professor in 2001.[1]

His work focuses on a wide range of topics, but he is best known for his studies of convergent evolution and adaptive radiation, and for experimental studies of evolution in nature. Most of his empirical work has involved the evolutionary radiation of lizards in the genus Anolis which can be found in the Caribbean. There, his experimental studies were realised.

From 2000-2003 and 2004-2005, Losos was director of Tyson Research Center at Washington University in St. Louis. Since 2006, he is Monique and Philip Lehner Professor for the Study of Latin America at Harvard University and Professor for Organismic and Evolutionary Bioloy, as well as the founding director of the Living Earth Collaborative, a biodiversity partnership between Washington University, the Missouri Botanical Garden and the Saint Louis Zoo.[2]

Since 2006, Losos is furthermore Curator of Herpetology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology.[3]

He has received a number of awards, including the Dobzhansky Prize in 1991, the David Starr Jordan Prize in 1998, the Edward O. Wilson Naturalist Award in 2009, the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal in 2012 and the Sewall Wright Award in 2019.[4]

Losos is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2005), as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2012) and the National Academy of Sciences (2018). In 2016, he became Distinguished Herpetologist of The Herpetologists' League.[5]

Losos is the author of two books, Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree: Ecology and Adaptive Radiation of Anoles (University of California Press, 2009) and Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance and the Future of Evolution (Riverhead Press, Penguin-Random House, 2017),[6] and has edited a number of others, including The Theory of Island Biogeography Revisited (co-edited by Robert Ricklefs; Princeton University Press, 2009), In the Light of Evolution: Essays from the Laboratory and Field (Roberts and Co., 2010), The Princeton Guide to Evolution (with many co-editors; Princeton University Press, 2014) and How Evolution Shapes Our Lives: Essays on Biology and Society (co-edited by Richard Lenski; Princeton University Press, 2016).