Stuart Andrew West is an evolutionary biologist studying social evolution and a Professor of evolutionary biology in the Biology Department at the University of Oxford.
Education West completed the Natural Sciences Tripos as an undergraduate student at the University of Cambridge followed by a PhD at Imperial College London on reproductive strategies in parasitic hymenoptera.
Career and research West's primary research interests are in the area of social evolution, sex allocation theory and microbial evolution. His research has attracted media attention, and has been published in high profile journals such as Nature, Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America and Current Biology. West uses theoretical and empirical approaches to explain the evolution of cooperation, communication, and sex ratio. With with John Krebs and Nicholas Davies, West is the co-author of the textbook An Introduction to Behavioural Ecology.
Awards and honours West was a distinguished junior scholar in residence at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, University of British Columbia, Canada in 1999 and he has won the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Zoology (2006), the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London (2006). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2026. He is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and a former holder of a Royal Society University Research Fellowship.
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