UCLA professor Daniel Blumstein has been named this year’s recipient of the Animal Behavior Society’s Quest Award. The award honors outstanding seminal contributions to the science of animal behavior. Blumstein will receive the award at the society's meeting in Toronto in June.
Between 2009 and 2016, Blumstein held the chair of UCLA’s Department of Ecology and Evolution. He co-directs the UCLA Evolutionary Medicine Program. The Blumstein Lab at UCLA studies the evolution of behavior, focusing on the assimilation of behavior and conservation biology.
Blumstein’s interests include the evolution of social and antipredator behavior and the ramifications behavioral mechanisms have for higher-level ecological processes and wildlife conservation. Through studying a variety of species of marmots as a model system, Blumstein spent half a decade capturing the evolution of complex communication and sociality.
Through the integration of knowledge of animal behavior and conservation biology, Blumstein’s research aims to illustrate how what we learn should influence policy-making. The UCLA professor has been actively engaged in using ecotourism as a form of community development as well as a way to conserve natural resources.
The society is a nonprofit, professional organization dedicated to promoting and encouraging the biological study of animal behavior in the broadest sense, including studies at all levels of organization using both descriptive and experimental methods under natural and controlled conditions.
