Mary Jane West-Eberhard

Who is Mary Jane West-Eberhard?

Mary Jane West-Eberhard is an American theoretical biologist noted for arguing that phenotypic and developmental plasticity played a key role in shaping animal evolution and speciation. She is also an entomologist notable for her work on the behavior and evolution of social wasps.

She is a member both of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2005 she was elected to be a foreign member of the Italian Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. She has been a past president of the Society for the Study of Evolution. She won the 2003 R.R. Hawkins Award for the Outstanding Professional, Reference or Scholarly Work for her book Developmental Plasticity and Evolution. In the same year she was the recipient of the Sewall Wright Award. She has been selected as one of the 21 “Leaders in Animal Behavior”.

She is engaged in long term research projects at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute at the Escuela de Biologia, Universidad de Costa Rica.