SFI External Professor Mark Pagel, a professor of biological sciences at Reading University (U.K.), has been named a Fellow of the Royal Society.
He joins fewer than 1,500 current Royal Society Fellows who constitute the U.K.’s most eminent scientists, engineers, and technologists. Fellows are elected through a peer review process and vote by existing Fellows. Each year 44 Fellows are selected from a group of more than 700 nominees.
The Royal Society announced its 2011 selectees this morning in London.
Dr. Pagel is an evolutionary theorist focusing on mathematical and statistical modeling of evolutionary trends. His research interests include language and cultural evolution, emergence of complex systems, robustness and evolvability, punctuated versus gradual evolutionary change, and evolutionary genomics. Read more about him here.
His co-authored 1991 monograph on comparative statistical methods in evolutionary biology is standard reading for the field. He also was the first to publish general linguistic theory to explain variation in rates of lexical evolution.
Dr. Pagel's Royal Society citation reads: “Mark Pagel is distinguished for having shown how a combination of phylogenetic trees of species and knowledge of their features can be used to reconstruct the evolutionary past and how it gave rise to the present. He has introduced novel statistical modelling techniques that provide solutions to outstanding problems of trait evolution. These solutions have influenced how evolutionary biologists and anthropologists conduct their science and the evolutionary questions they test. He has used his approaches to address and solve questions of fundamental importance involving speciation, adaptation, punctuational evolution and human cultural and linguistic evolution.”
The Royal Society, founded in 1660, is the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence. Its goals are to “expand the frontiers of knowledge by championing the development and use of science, mathematics, engineering, and medicine for the benefit of humanity and the good of the planet.”
Dr. Pagel is the third SFI-affiliated scientist to be named a Fellow of the Royal Society. The other two are Sir Martin Rees and Robert May, Baron of Oxford.
More than 100 SFI External Professors contribute to the Institute’s research mission and are affiliated with some 70 research organizations in 20 countries.