SFI External Professor Brian Enquist (University of Arizona) has been awarded the Ecological Society of America's prestigious Robert H. MacArthur Award.
The award recognizes a mid-career ecologist for “meritorious contributions to ecology, in expectation of continued outstanding research.”
The Society recognizes Enquist, an ecologist and macroecologist, for his work linking functional traits in organisms to the structure and functioning of communities and ecosystems; developing quantitative tools that advance understanding of ecological organization across scales; and, in early collaboration with SFI’s James Brown and Geoffrey West, advancing Metabolic Scaling Theory to identify parallels between plant vascular systems and animal cardiovascular systems. More recently, and in collaboration with SFI’s Van Savage and colleagues, Enquist has built on that work to co-develop the Trait Driver Theory, which extends ideas from adaptive dynamics and quantitative genetics. It provides a predictive framework for how trait variation in individuals, species, and communities scales up to impact ecosystems and the dynamics of biodiversity across space and time.
Enquist is also active in building global collaborations around functional trait research and Open Science. “Through these contributions, Enquist helped transform . . . ecology into a more predictive, trait-based science and fostered an international community dedicated to integrative ecological research,” writes the Ecological Society of America in their news release.
The MacArthur award is one of the highest recognitions given to outstanding mid-career ecologists. “It's great to see such an important career (still in mid-flight) and such important ideas being recognized in this way,” says Chris Kempes, SFI Professor and Science Steering Committee Chair.
Enquist will be recognized, along with other winners of the ESA’s 2026 awards, on July 27 at the Society’s upcoming Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Previous SFI-affiliated winners include Robert May (1984), Simon Levin (1988), Jim Brown (2002), and Mercedes Pasqual (2014).
Read the Ecological Society of America news release (May 6, 2026)