University of Chicago paleontologist David Jablonski today was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of his distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.
Jablonski, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor in Geophysical Sciences, was among 72 new members and 18 foreign associates from 14 countries announced by the Academy. A private organization of scientists and engineers, the Academy was established in 1863 by a congressional act of incorporation signed by Abraham Lincoln to act as an official adviser to the federal government, upon request, in any matter of science or technology.
Jablonski focuses his research on macroevolution, which encompasses the study of large-scale patterns of evolution above the species level, mass-extinctions and their long-term consequences, diversification in time and space, and the origin of evolutionary breakthroughs.
Jablonski came to Chicago in 1985 from the University of Arizona, where he had been a member of the department of ecology and evolutionary biology. He is also a research associate of the Field Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, and he is a former research fellow of the Natural History Museum in London.
He was named a fellow of the Paleontological Society in 2005, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000, and a Guggenheim Fellow in 1999. In 1988, he received the Paleontological Society's Schuchert Award for outstanding paleontologist under the age of 40. In 2004, he won the University's Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
Jablonski is the co-editor of three books, Evolutionary Paleobiology (1996), Patterns and Processes in the History of Life (1986) and The Encyclopedia of Paleontology (1979). He has published more than 100 scientific papers and book chapters.
—Prof. Jacqueline Stewart
