Evolutionary biologist enters Royal Society

The Royal Society, the United Kingdom’s largest academy of sciences, appointed IU evolutionary biologist Loren Rieseberg as a 2010 fellow Friday.

Rieseberg will join 44 new fellows from the British Commonwealth and Ireland, as well as eight “foreign members” from other countries including the United States and France. 

Stephen Hawking, author Richard Dawkins and mathematician Frances Kirwan are only three of the acadamy’s 1300 living fellows.

Rieseberg will supervise projects that integrate high-throughput genomic methods, bioinformatics, ecological experiments and evolutionary theory to study the origin and evolution of species, domesticated plants and weeds. His primary interest is how new plant species arise - one of biology’s most fundamental questions. Most of Rieseberg’s work has focused on members of the genus Helianthus, which includes wild and domesticated sunflowers.

According to the Royal Society, from an IU press release, Rieseberg “has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of speciation mechanisms and the evolution of local adaptation,” “pioneered the application of experimental genomic approaches to studies of microevolutionary processes,” and “demonstrated that new diploid plant species arise through hybridization, that this mode of speciation results from significant ecological  and karyotypic divergence, and that the process occurs with remarkable speed.”

In 2004, Rieseberg was elected a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Guggenheim Foundation. He was also elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003, and was selected by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to receive a MacArther Fellowship, also referred to as “the MacArthur Genius Award,” that same year.

— Bailey Loosemore