Leticia Avilés is full professor at the Department of Zoology and the Biodiversity Research Centre at the University of British Columbia (UBC), in Vancouver, Canada. With an emphasis on group-living arthropods, her research seeks to elucidate the forces responsible for the origin of higher levels of organization and the consequences of such origins on the structure and dynamics of populations. She earned her PhD at Harvard University and was a post-doctoral fellow and then assistant and associate professor at the University of Arizona (UofA) before joining UBC in 2002. Work in her lab uses both empirical and theoretical approaches to explore the drivers and selective forces involved in the formation of social groups. She has published over 80 papers and book chapters and trained graduate and undergrad students and post docs at three institutions (UBC, UofA, and the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, in Quito, where she initiated her training as a biologist). She has received funding from NSF, NSERC, and the James S. MacDonnell Foundation and is a recipient of the American Society of Naturalists Young Investigator Award, a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin and of the Animal Behaviour Society. She will be joining the board of the American Naturalist as the Natural History Editor in March 2023.
