Dr. Dolph Schluter is the world’s foremost authority on the role that ecology plays in the origin and divergence of new species. His work has fundamentally changed our understanding of evolution, revealing the ecological mechanisms driving speciation and probing the factors generating and maintaining biodiversity.
His seminal book The Ecology of Adaptive Radiation has received universal praise as one of the most important treatises on speciation and the origin of ecological diversity since Darwin’s. Throughout his research career, Schluter has combined creative experimental studies, incisive field observations, and novel analytical tools to push the field forward and earn his reputation as the leading evolutionary ecologist worldwide.
Species are the result of genetic changes that make one group of organisms distinct and reproductively isolated from another (speciation). What exactly drives these genetic changes has been a major puzzle in biology. Schluter used stickleback fishes from B.C. to obtain evidence that it is natural selection in different environments that is the key driver of speciation (“ecological speciation”). Surprisingly, he also showed that speciation is repeatable, in that the same stickleback mating preferences have evolved independently in different B.C. lakes.
Schluter and his colleagues have pursued this work to the genetic level, determining the key genes that have changed as stickleback adapt to the different environments in which they occur in B.C.
Schluter is also a devoted and talented mentor and teacher. He has directly supervised 29 graduate students and 30 post-doctoral fellows and taught thousands of UBC students how to think about and analyze biological data. In the 1980s, Schluter initiated an approach to teaching statistics that centres around developing a deep curiosity about the questions that then drive students to find answers. The statistics courses that he developed form the basis for how statistics is taught to biologists around the world.
With Michael Whitlock, Schluter authored a textbook on statistics The Analysis of Biological Data, which has been widely adopted by over 200 universities worldwide. Schluter’s excellence in teaching has been recognized by the 2010 Killam Mentoring Award from UBC.
From 2003-2007, Schluter served as the director of UBC’s Biodiversity Research Centre. During that time, he launched the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, Vancouver’s only natural history museum. Schluter has also contributed his knowledge to help conserve freshwater fish in B.C., particularly by helping draft the recovery strategy for sticklebacks and co-developing guidelines to protect these and other endangered fishes in the province.
With over 49,300 citations to his research, Schluter brings enormous recognition and prestige to British Columbia. He has received the premier life-time achievement awards given internationally in his field: the Sewall Wright Award and the Darwin-Wallace Medal. His long list of honours include membership in the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Canada, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the US National Academy of Sciences.
