PROFILE

Stephen T. Emlen is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Behavioral Ecology at Cornell University. He is a world authority on the social behavior of animals, particularly birds. He has made pioneering contributions to our understanding of the diverse forms of animals societies as well as the behavioral strategies employed by individuals living within such societies. He is the author of over 100 scientific papers and has been on the executive committees and administrative boards of numerous professional organizations. He recently served as President of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology.

Emlen did his undergraduate work at Swarthmore College, obtained his Ph.D.in Zoology from the Univeristy of Michigan, and joined the Cornell faculty shortly thereafter. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Animal Behavior Society, and the American Ornithologists' Union, a Corresponding Fellow of the Deutschen Ornithologen Gesellschaft, and has been a National Lecturer for the Society of Sigma Xi. He is a recipient of the E. P. Edwards Award from the Wilson Ornithological Society and the William Brewster Medal for research excellence from the American Ornithologists' Union. He has been both a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow (in Kenya) and a William Fulbright Scholar (in the Republic of Panama) and has held visiting professorships or researchships at the National Museums of Kenya, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Stanford), the University of South Florida, Griffith University (Australia), the University of Queensland (Australia), and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (Republic of Panama).

Emlen's interests center on evolutionary or adaptive aspects of animal behavior. In his early work he conducted extensive research on (1) the orientation and navigation capabilities of migratory birds, and (2) the encodement of communication information in bird song. His interests then shifted to behavioral ecology. Here he has studied topics as diverse as (3) the role of ecological factors in shaping mating systems (monogamy, polygyny, polyandry, and promiscuity), (4) the costs and benefits of group living, (5) the adaptive bases of sex differences in behavior, (6) the evolution of cooperative and altruistic behavior in animal societies, and (7) the formation and social dynamics of multi-generational families among animals. He has also speculated (8) on how the incorporation of an evolutionary framework can increase our understanding of the human social condition.

The goal of Emlen's research is to better understand the social interactions that occur between individuals. He believes that the Darwinian logic of natural selection theory provides a powerful framework for achieving this understanding. Evolutionary social theory has made tremendous advances in the past two decades, and has proven remarkably robust in predicting behavioral interactions in widely divergent taxa of organisms. Emlen is particularly interested in the juxtaposition of cooperation and conflict in societies comprised of close genetic relatives. As our knowledge of such societies increases, so too does our ability to use animal models as analogs for better understanding human social behavior. This, in turn, provides the potential for practical applications such as new counseling and intervention programs effective in dealing with such issues as family violence and sexual conflict.