David Jablonski

Dr. David Jablonski is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Geophysical Sciences and Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago. He is also a research associate of the Field Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. Jablonski studies the ecology and biogeography of the origin of major novelties, the evolutionary role of mass extinctions, and other large-scale processes in the history of life. In order to do this, he combines data from living and fossil organisms to study the origins and fates of lineages and adaptations, with a focus on marine bivalves. His work has shown that the “tropics-as-cradle-or-museum” paradigm of the past 30 years is a false dichotomy, with the tropics being an evolutionary source of expanding lineages that also accumulate in their tropical starting places. His parallel research into the macroevolution of extinction and survival suggests that evolutionary patterns are shaped by the alternation of extinction regimes, with rare but influential mass extinctions driving unexpected evolutionary shifts. Jablonski has received numerous awards for his work, including a Guggenheim fellowship and the Paleontological Society's Charles Schuchert Award. In addition to his American Academy of Arts and Sciences membership, Jablonski is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and of the Paleontological Society. His numerous publications appear in journals such as Evolution, PNAS, and Science.