Distinguished Professor Department of Ecology and Evolution SUNY at Stony Brook State University of New York

Education : Lab Page : Research Interests :

Ph.D. 1969, University of Michigan Douglas Futuyma's research interests in evolution focus primarily on speciation and the evolution of ecological interactions among species. He has been a Guggenheim and a Fulbright Fellow, the President of the Society for the Study of Evolution, the American Society of Naturalists, and the American Insitute of Biological Sciences, the editor of Evolution, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is editor of the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, and is the author of the successful textbooks Evolutionary Biology and Evolution. Most of his work has centered on the population biology of herbivorous insects and the evolution of their affiliation with host plants. Research on several species centered on genetic differences conferring adaptation to different host plants, and cast light on the evolution of host specificity. Recent work has focussed on whether or not constraints on genetic variation are likely to have influenced the phylogenetic history of host associations in a group of leaf beetles, and on the pattern of speciation in this group. Futuyma's students have worked on diverse evolutionary and ecological studies of insect-plant interactions and of speciation in insects.