Dr. Simon A. Levin is the Moffett Professor of Biology at Princeton University and the Director of Princeton’s Center for BioComplexity. From 1965 to1992 , he was at Cornell Univeristy, where he was Chair of the Section of Ecology and Systematics, and then Director of the Ecosystems Research Center, the Center for Environmental Research and the Program on Theoretical and Computational Biology, as well as Charles A. Alexander Professor of Biological Sciences (1985-1992). His research interests are in understanding how macroscopic patterns and processes are maintained at the level of ecosystems and the biosphere, in terms of ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that operate primarily at the level of organisms; in infectious diseases; and in the interface between basic and applied ecology.

Professor Levin is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science as well as a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He chairs the Governing Council for International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), and co-chairs the Science Board of the Santa Fe Institute. He is a former President of the Ecological Society of America and the Society for Mathematical Biology, and a past Chair of the Board of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics. Among other awards, he won the MacArthur Award (1988) and the Distinguished Service Citation (1998) of the Ecological Society of America, and the Okubo Award of the Society for Mathematical Biology and the Japanese Society for Theoretical Biology. He was honored with the Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (2004), the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences (2005) by the Inamori Foundation, and the Distinguished Scientist Award of the American Institute of Biological Sciences.