David M. Hillis: Brief Biography

David M. Hillis is the Alfred W. Roark Centennial Professor in Natural Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin, where he studies molecular evolution and biodiversity in the Department of Integrative Biology. He is the Director of the Dean’s Scholars Program of the College of Natural Sciences and Director of the University's Biodiversity Center. He also served as the first Director of the School of Biological Sciences and oversaw the reorganization of the biological sciences at the University of Texas. He teaches courses in introductory biology, genetics, evolution, biological systematics, and biodiversity, and was awarded the University of Texas Civitatis Award in recognition of his service to the University.

Hillis is recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship, and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in recognition of his work in the field of molecular evolution. He has served as President of the Society for the Study of Evolution and as President of the Society of Systematic Biologists. His publications include more than 200 scientific research papers and books on evolution and biodiversity.

Curriculum reform in the biological sciences is another of Hillis’s passions. He served on the National Research Council’s Committee of Biology Education and co-authored that committee’s influential report, BIO2010: Transforming Undergraduate Education for Future Research Biologists. He has also co-authored popular textbooks in biology, including Molecular Systematics (now in its 2nd edition), Life: The Science of Biology (now in its 12th edition), and most recently, Principles of Life (now in its 3rd edition).

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I, Gordon H. Orians, am Professor Emeritus of Biology at the University of Washington, Seattle, where I spent my entire career after receiving a Bachelor of Science in Zoology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in June 1954, and a PhD in Zoology from the University of California, Berkeley, in August 1960.  Although my research has focused on basic rather than applied topics I have devoted much attention to applications of scientific information to social problems, serving for ten years as Director of the University’s Institute for Environmental Studies.

My research interests have ranged over a variety of topics, but behavioral ecology has occupied most of my attention.  Issues of habitat selection, mate selection and mating systems, selection of prey and foraging patches (foraging theory), and relationships between ecology and social organization occupied much of my attention.  The primary subjects of my studies were blackbirds of the Family Icteridae, a group of birds noted for the diversity of their social systems.  My publications include theoretical papers as well as tests of theories using experimental manipulations and comparative analyses of interspecific patterns. My peers thought highly enough of my research to elect me to the National Academy of Sciences in 1989 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in1990.

For more than a decade my graduate students and I focused our attention on a long-recognized but surprising pattern in community ecology, namely that in most environments herbivores annually consume a relatively small proportion of the biomass of green plants.  Many different ideas have been proposed to explain this pattern, among which is the possible role of chemical defenses of plants against grazing.  We conducted research on the types of defensive chemicals synthesized by different kinds of plants, how their production may be stimulated by herbivore attacks, and how herbivores neutralize toxic chemicals produced by plants. Clearly, plant defensive chemistry is part of the explanation for why the world is so green.

For many years I devoted much time to the interface between science and public policy, serving on the Board of Directors of World Wildlife Fund, the Board of Trustees of The Washington State Chapter of The Nature Conservancy, and the Board of Audubon Alaska. The combination of my general concern with issues of environmental quality and environmental policies and my work on habitat selection among birds stimulated me to apply to human behavior the approach to the study of habitat selection I had used in my research on birds.  I began by studying how we select places in which to live and developed the Savanna Hypothesis to explain our responses to trees of different shapes. This research expanded to encompass a variety of topics and resulted in cooperation with psychologists, geographers, planners, and landscape painters. The culmination of this research is my book, Snakes Sunrises, and Shakespeare. How Evolution Shapes our Loves and Fears.

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Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs, and more