Russell Lande


Russell Scott Lande is an American evolutionary biologist and ecologist, and an International Chair Professor at Centre for Biodiversity Dynamics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He is a fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences.

Education and career

He received his Ph.D. in 1976 from Harvard University where he was a student of Richard Lewontin, and completed his Postdoctoral work at the University of Wisconsin under James F. Crow. He then held positions at the University of Chicago, University of Oregon, University of California, San Diego, and Imperial College London.
In 2016 he was employed as an International Chair Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Work

Lande is best known for his early work extending quantitative genetics theory to the context of evolutionary biology in natural populations. In particular, he developed a stochastic theory for the evolution of quantitative traits by genetic drift and natural selection. He also proposed a multivariate framework to describe the effect of selection on multiple correlated characters, thus helping clarify the much-debated notion of genetic constraints in phenotypic evolution. He later applied and extended these results to study a wide variety of topics in evolutionary biology, including: sexual selection, speciation, the evolution of phenotypic plasticity, of self-fertilization, of life history, of a species range in space and time.
Apart from his work in evolutionary genetics, Lande has substantially contributed to the fields of population dynamics and conservation biology. In particular, his model on the effect of habitat fragmentation on the extinction threshold of territorial species was central to the debate about the conservation of the Northern spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest. He and Georgina Mace contributed to clarify the categories for the IUCN red list, by proposing new criteria based on measurable quantities relating to times to extinction. He is a specialist of stochastic population dynamics, on which he co-authored a book with Steinar Engen and Bernt-Erik Sæther, and of methods for estimating density dependence from time series of population density.
Some of the concepts and tools he introduced, such as the phenotypic selection gradient and the G matrix, have become standard in evolutionary biology.

Publications

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