Evan P. Economo
This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.
Evan P. Economo is a professor at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, where he leads the Biodiversity and Biocomplexity Unit. His research group integrates field, lab, and quantitative approaches to understand the processes generating and maintaining biodiversity.
During the fellowship year, Economo is working to illuminate large-scale patterns of invertebrate diversity, addressing a major gap in our knowledge of how life distributed around the globe. He will analyze the global biogeography of two abundant insect groups, ants and butterflies, and investigate how symbiotic interactions between these groups have shaped their evolutionary diversification.
Economo received his PhD in ecology, evolution, and behavior from the University of Texas at Austin. He was a postdoc in the Michigan Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan before moving to his faculty position in Japan. He has won awards from the American Society of Naturalists and the Ecological Society of Japan and led projects funded by Japan’s Ministry of the Environment, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the National Science Foundation.
