Albert Einstein World Award of Science 2002
Field of Research: Biology
Date: 14 November 2002
Place of Ceremony: Trinity College
Host Institution: University of Dublin
Host Country: Dublin, Ireland
Dublin, Ireland. November 2002. The World Cultural Council presented the 2002 Albert Einstein World Award of Science to Prof. Daniel Janzen, Professor of Biology, Department of Biology at University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA. The Award Ceremony took place in Dublin, Ireland, the host being Trinity College of the University of Dublin.
The Albert Einstein World Award for Science has been established as a means of recognition and as an incentive to scientific and technological research and development. It takes into special consideration research that has brought true benefit and wellbeing to humankind.
This recognition made by the members of the Interdisciplinary Committee of the World Cultural Council to Prof. Janzen is due to his many contributions in the field of Biological Sciences. He is also a renowned educator who has applied his fundamental knowledge of biology to the issue of the conservation of natural resources, in particular, the conservation of tropical biodiversity.
It is a prize granted to Prof. Janzen for his productive trajectory related to the work done in the environmental sciences and for his contribution to the scientific legacy of the world.
In the field of biological sciences, Prof. Janzen is one of those rare academics who puts theory into practice, in this case the practice of habitat conservation. His career has focussed on the complex interactions observed between plants and the animals that use them as food sources. These interactions are crucial for the stability of ecosystems and are constantly spurring on the evolution of both interacting partners.
Prof. Janzen was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, in 1939. He attended the University of Minnesota in 1961, and he received his Ph.D in Biology in 1965 at the University of California, Berkeley. He began his professional life collecting butterflies in Veracruz, Mexico in the early 1950s, and did his thesis research in the same place ten years later. From 1965 to 1986, Janzen was a key figure in the design and execution of model field experiments and case studies in tropical field ecology, with a special emphasis on tropical animal-plant interactions. As a result of these studies, Prof. Janzen has received numerous academic honours. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, winner of the Crafoord Prize in Biology (from the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences), and winner of a MacArthur Fellowship. His career is a role model for combining world-class scholarship with dedicated efforts to improve the state of humankind.
