Rosemary G. Gillespie

Known for work on adaptive radiations of spiders and insects in the Hawaiian archipelago, she made ground-breaking discoveries on the way in which species communities are built up by both in situ radiation and colonization, as the islands appeared. She currently heads up a large multi-disciplinary study to extend this to multiple groups of arthropods across Hawaii, using cutting edge DNA sequencing technology and theoretical modeling, and thereby generating perhaps the best understanding of the roles of evolution and ecology in community assembly--an outstanding question in evolutionary biology. Recently her work was extended all across the Pacific, thereby assessing the generalization of patterns discovered in Hawaii.