Russell Lande facts for kids

Russell Scott Lande (born in 1951) is an American scientist. He studies how living things change over time, which is called evolutionary biology. He also studies how living things interact with their environment, known as ecology.

Professor Lande is currently an International Chair Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). He is a respected member of the Royal Society and the United States National Academy of Sciences.

Becoming a Scientist

Russell Lande earned his Ph.D. in 1976 from Harvard University. There, he studied with a famous scientist named Richard Lewontin. After that, he continued his research at the University of Wisconsin.

He then worked at several well-known universities. These included the University of Chicago and Imperial College London. In 2016, he became a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

What He Studies

Professor Lande is famous for his early work on quantitative genetics. This field looks at how traits like height or weight change in groups of animals over many generations. He created a way to understand how these traits evolve. He showed how random changes and natural selection affect them.

He also developed a way to study how many different traits change together. This helped scientists understand how some traits might limit how others can evolve.

Key Areas of Research

Russell Lande has studied many interesting topics in evolution. These include:

• Sexual selection: How animals choose their mates.
• Speciation: How new species are formed.
• Phenotypic plasticity: How living things can change their traits to fit different environments.
• Life history: How long animals live and how many offspring they have.
• Species range: Where a species lives and how that area changes over time.

Protecting Animals

Besides evolution, Professor Lande has done important work in conservation biology. This field focuses on protecting endangered species and their habitats.

He created a model to show how breaking up natural areas, called habitat fragmentation, affects animals. This model was very important in discussions about protecting the Northern spotted owl. This owl lives in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.

He also helped improve the categories for the IUCN red list. This list helps identify species that are at risk of extinction. He suggested new ways to decide which species need the most help.

Professor Lande also wrote a book about how random events affect animal populations. He developed ways to figure out how population size changes over time.

Important Tools for Scientists

Some of the ideas and tools he created are now used by many scientists. For example, the "selection gradient" helps measure how natural selection affects traits. The "G matrix" helps scientists understand how different traits are connected genetically.

Awards and Recognition

Russell Lande has received many important awards for his scientific work:

• Sewall Wright Award (1992)
• Guggenheim Fellowship (1996)
• MacArthur Fellowship (1997)
• Weldon Memorial Prize and Medal (2010)
• Balzan Prize (2011)
• Fellow of the Royal Society (2012)
• Elected member, United States National Academy of Sciences (2015)
• Outstanding Paper Award, The Wildlife Society (TWS) (2015)