Eric R. Pianka

Eric R. Pianka earned a B. A. from Carleton College in 1960, a Ph.D. from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1965, and the D. Sc. degree or his collected works from the University of Western Australia in 1990. He was a postdoctoral with the late Robert H. MacArthur at Princeton University during 1966-68. He was the Denton A. Cooley Centennial Professor of Zoology at the University of Texas in Austin, where he had taught evolutionary ecology since 1968, and where he retired from in 2020.

Pianka was a lifelong and outspoken advocate for natural history and for natural places who made multiple contributions to evolutionary ecology. His early work pioneered patterns and correlates of species diversity of desert lizards, and his conceptual review of latitudinal gradients in species diversity was an instant classic. A paper he coauthored with Robert MacArthur helped found optimal foraging theory. He worked for decades on the general ecology of desert lizards in North America, the Kalahari, and especially Australia.

Pianka presented hundreds of invited lectures at most of the world's major academic institutions as well as several important plenary lectures. During his 50 year academic career, he sponsored 20 graduate students and published well over a hundred scientific papers, four of which became "Citation Classics," as well as dozens of invited articles, book chapters, and 18 books including an autobiography. His classic textbook Evolutionary Ecology, first published in 1974, has been translated into Greek, Japanese, Polish, Russian and Spanish, and is now available as an eBook.