Eric Charnov

Who is Eric Charnov?

Eric L. Charnov is an American evolutionary ecologist. He is best known for his work on foraging, especially the marginal value theorem, and life history theory, especially sex allocation and scaling/allometric rules. He is a MacArthur Fellow and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Three of his papers are Science Citation Classics.

Charnov gained his PhD in evolutionary ecology from the University of Washington in 1973. He is a Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of New Mexico.

His research interests are:

Metabolic ecology: temperature and body size in the determination of biological times and rates; Evolutionary ecology: population genetics, evolutionary game theory, and optimization models to understand the evolution of life histories, sex allocation, sexual selection, and foraging decisions.