Santa Fe Institute

Bio

Robert McCredie, Baron May of Oxford, OM AC Kt, is President of the Royal Society (2000-2005), and holds a Professorship jointly in the Department of Zoology, Oxford University, and at Imperial College, London, and is a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. For the five-year period ending September 2000, he was Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government, and Head of its Office of Science and Technology. Initially enrolled in Chemical Engineering, May ended up with a BSc and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from Sydney University. He then spent two years as Gordon MacKay Lecturer in Applied Mathematics at Harvard University, returning to Sydney University as Senior Lecturer (later Reader and, at age 33, the holder of Sydney University's first Personal Chair) in Theoretical Physics. In the early 1970's he became interested in the dynamics of animal populations (particularly the "chaotic" dynamical behaviour that can arise) and in the relations between stability and complexity in natural communities. May moved to Princeton University as Class of 1877 Professor of Zoology in 1973. From 1977 until he moved to Britain as a Royal Society Research Professor in 1988, he was Chairman of the University Research Board at Princeton University, having broad administrative responsibility for all externally and internally funded research. May's current research deals with factors influencing the diversity and abundance of plant and animal species, and with the rates, causes and consequences of extinction. These interests are reflected, inter alia, in his recent edited books Large Scale Ecology and Conservation Biology (Blackwell, 1994), Extinction Rates (Oxford University Press, 1995) and Evolution of Biological Diversity (OUP, 1999). His earlier work on evolutionary and dynamical aspects of the interaction between parasites B broadly defined to include viruses, bacteria, protozoa and helminths B and their hosts, with particular emphasis on the role of infectious diseases in the regulation of natural populations of plants and animals, has more recently led to research on the interactions between populations of viruses and immune system cells (addressing, in particular, the yet-unsolved problem of why there is so long, and so variable, an interval between infection with HIV and the onset of AIDS). This work is drawn together in Virus Dynamics: the Mathematical Foundations of Immunology and Virology (OUP, 2000), written with Martin Nowak. Earlier books include Stability and Complexity in Model Ecosystems (Princeton University Press, 1973, re-issued with a retrospective introduction in the Princeton Landmarks in Biology series, 2000), and Infectious Diseases of Humans: Transmission and Control (OUP, 1991, written with Roy Anderson). Edited volumes include Theoretical Ecology: Principles and Applications (Blackwell, 1976 and 1981), Population Biology of Infectious Diseases (Springer, 1982), Exploitation of Marine Ecosystems (Springer, 1984), Perspectives in Ecological Theory (Princeton University Press, 1988), and Population Regulation and Dynamics (Cambridge University Press, 1990). There are also several hundred papers in major scientific journals, and broader contributions to scientific journalism both in publications like Nature and Science, and in broadsheets, radio and TV (eg, as consultant to Attenborough=s State of the Planet series). He was awarded a Knighthood in 1996, appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1998, both for “services to science”. In 2001 he was one of the first 15 Life Peers created by the “House of Lords Appointments Commission”, which was established as an independent mechanism for appointing non-party-political Peers following the removal of the voting rights of hereditary Peers. In 2002, The Queen appointed him to the Order of Merit (the fifth Australian in its 100-year history). Particularly notable among his many international Awards, Medals and Prize Lectureships are: the Royal Swedish Academy of Science=s Crafoord Prize in 1996 (this award, worth US$500,000, is intended to complement the Nobel Prizes by cycling on a 3-year basis among mathematics, earth and space sciences, and "biosciences and ecology"; May is cited "for pioneering ecological research in theoretical analysis of the dynamics of populations, communities and ecosystems"); the 1998 Balzan Prize presented by the President of Italy (this SF500,000 prize was given by the Swiss-Italian Balzan Foundation for May=s Aseminal contributions to the mathematical analysis of biodiversity, in particular his pioneering work on chaos theory and ecological systems and the development of a variety of methods for estimating the total number of species alive on earth today and rates of extinction@); and the 2001 Blue Planet Prize (this 50 million yen prize was given by the Asahi Glass Foundation “for developing mathematical ecology and the fundamental tools for ecological conservation planning”). May was elected to the Royal Society in 1979, the Australian Academy of Sciences in 1991, Academia Europaea in 1994, and (as a Foreign Member) the US National Academy of Sciences in 1992; he is a Honorary Life Member or Fellow of various other learned societies. He holds honorary degrees from Uppsala University (1990), Yale University (1993), The University of Sydney (1995), Princeton University (1996; along with President Clinton, as part of the University's 250th Anniversary celebrations), the ETH Zurich (2003), and several UK universities. Lord May is an Executive Trustee of the Nuffield Foundation, a Board Member of the UK Sport Institute, and a Foundation Trustee of Cambridge University=s Gates Trust (their recently-established analogue of Oxford=s Rhodes). A selected list of previous such posts in the UK includes: Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London; Trustee of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; Independent Member of the Joint Nature Conservancy Councils (JNCC); Trustee of WWF (UK); and President of the British Ecological Society. In his youth in Australia he played chess and contract bridge at the national level. These days he is an enthusiastic hiker, runner and tennis player.