Alan Hastings

Alan Hastings received his BS in 1973 and his PhD in 1977, both from Cornell University.  After two years on the faculty at Washington State University, he joined the faculty at the University of California, Davis, where he is currently a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy.  

His research focuses on the use of theoretical approaches to understand a broad range of questions in ecology, with an emphasis on the role of space and other forms of structure.  He has worked on problems ranging from the dynamics of food webs to the roles of both dispersal and complex dynamics in shaping ecological dynamics to more applied questions including the management of invasive species and the development of marine protected areas.  Recent work has emphasized the interface between ecology and economics, the use of statistical approaches for understanding ecological data, understanding regime shifts, control of invasive species, transient dynamics, fisheries management, and laboratory experiments with flour beetles to investigate spatial population dynamics.

He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Ecological Society of America, SIAM and the Society for Mathematical Biology and received the Robert H. MacArthur Award from the Ecological Society of America in 2006.

He is the founding Editor in Chief of the journal Theoretical Ecology, and also currently serving as the co-Editor in Chief of the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology and on the editorial board of PNAS. He previously was co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Mathematical Biology and co-edited the Encyclopedia of Theoretical Ecology.