Nils Christian Stenseth

Nils Christian Stenseth

Nils Christian Stenseth (born July 29, 1949 in Fredrikstad , Norway) is a Norwegian biologist with a focus on ecology and evolution . He is the director of the Center for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES) at the University of Oslo . He is also a senior scientist at the Norwegian Institute for Marine Research in Norway.

Career

Stenseth completed his first studies in 1972 at the University of Oslo with a focus on biology, zoology and mathematics . He then did his doctorate at the same university, where he studied with John Maynard Smith at the University of Sussex and still mainly worked on the theoretical aspects of evolution and ecology. His work on the Red Queen Hypothesis (Van Valen, 1973; Stenseth, 1979; Stenseth and Maynard-Smith, 1984) and his work on the population cycles of the mountain lemming are among the most important publications from this period . In 1978 he was promoted to Dr. philos. and in 1980 he was appointed Professor of Population Ecology and Zoology at the University of Oslo. He later turned to more empirical research. He became chairman of the Center for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES).

From 2009 to 2014 he was Vice President / President of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences . He is also a visiting scholar at the Chinese Academy of Sciences , a member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences, the French Académie des Sciences and the Academia Europaea . In 2001 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Antwerp .

In 2019 he was awarded the ECI Prize of the International Ecology Institute . In 2020 he was awarded the Chinese Prize for International Science and Technology Cooperation.

Publications

• Where Have All the Species Gone - Nature of Extinction and the Red Queen Hypothesis. Oikos 33 (2), 1979, pp. 196-227
• with JM Smith: Coevolution in Ecosystems - Red Queen Evolution or Stasis. Evolution, 38 (4), 1984, pp. 870-880

literature

• Van Valen, L. (1973). A new evolutionary law. Evolutionary Theory 1 (1): 1-30.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Vita on the website of the University of Oslo, accessed on March 3, 2020