American Society of Naturalists

The ASN 2026 Election will be held from February 2 to March 2, 2026, for the offices of President and Vice President. Please see the candidates’ statements below. The election website randomizes the order for each person voting. The names below are in alphabetical order.

President

The PRESIDENT leads the ASN Executive Council and selects the membership of the award and officer nomination committees. The President selects the President’s Award for the “best” paper in The American Naturalist in the past year, gives the ASN Presidential Address and presents the Society’s awards at the annual meeting, and represents the ASN in multiple other ways through the year. The President serves on the Executive Council for five years, including one year as President-Elect and three years as a Past-President.

Anurag Agrawal, Cornell University

Thank you for this opportunity to serve one of my most beloved communities. I am an evolutionary ecologist and naturalist, broadly interested in questions and approaches that help us understand our natural and social world. My primary research has focused on plant–herbivore coevolution, using tools from comparative biology, experimental manipulations, genetics, and natural history.

I was an undergraduate Biology major and then a master’s student in Conservation Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, and I went on to UC Davis for my PhD in Population Biology (1999). With the support of mentors, peers, and students, I have been fortunate to be recognized by several societies in the ecological and evolutionary sciences and in the broader arenas of scholarship, including recent election to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

Most of my service and leadership has been within Cornell—mentoring junior faculty, serving on university committees at multiple levels, and helping to direct our interdisciplinary sustainability center during its founding. Outside of Cornell, I have served as Vice President of ASN and on several committees of ASN and Ecological Society of America.

As a graduate student, I aspired to publish in The American Naturalist, and only after four rejections did I finally make it! The journal and society have long felt closest to my core interests, and several standalone meetings remain among my most enjoyable conferences and scientific interactions. This is the society for which I would feel most comfortable in a leadership role because of the alignment of interests, values, and the people.

To the extent that I can, I would like to help steer the Society in the direction its membership wants to go, while of course keeping in mind the Society’s enduring mission: conceptual unification across biology, using whatever tools are needed. I strive to be fair, to listen carefully and consider diverse perspectives, and to be decisive when decisions are needed. At my core, I want to promote intellectual curiosity, staying true to the pursuit of understanding nature, and expanding access to that pursuit. I finally have the space in my life, personally and professionally, to give back to ASN, and I am grateful for the opportunity.

Maria E. Orive, University of Kansas

I am extremely honored to be considered for the position of President of the American Society of Naturalists (ASN) and the possibility of continuing to serve the society in this role. My research develops mathematical models that provide a conceptual framework for exploring important questions in evolutionary biology and eco-evolutionary processes. Much of my work has focused on the role of reproductive strategy (e.g., asexual and clonal forms of reproduction, and sexual reproduction) in shaping the genetic diversity available for evolution to act on, and the relative strengths of those evolutionary forces.

I completed my undergraduate degree at Stanford University, and received my PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, where I was advised by Monty Slatkin. I first joined ASN while I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley and published a chapter of my dissertation in The American Naturalist during that time. My further training involved two postdoctoral positions, one in the Department of Genetics at the University of Georgia with Marjorie Asmussen, and the second as an NSF NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh with Nick Barton. I joined the faculty at the University of Kansas (KU) in 1997, where I am currently Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Associate Dean for Natural Sciences and Mathematics. While at KU, I spent one year as a Radcliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard University, and I was named an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow in 2022.

I have contributed extensive service to science and to scientific societies, including serving as Associate Chair of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) Advisory Board (2008–2011), on the American Genetic Association Council (2013–2015), and on the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE) Council (2021–2023). While on SSE Council, I served on the SSE Rosemary Grant Award Committee, the SSE Hamilton Award Committee, the SSE Gould Award Committee, and the SSE Constitution and Bylaws Ad Hoc Committee. I also served as an associate editor for Evolution (2022–2024) and was a long-time member of the SSE Diversity Committee (2017–2020, 2021–2023). I was elected President of the American Genetic Association (AGA), and served as President-elect / President / Past-President from 2018–2020; during my term I planned and convened the 2019 AGA President’s Symposium (Sex and Asex: The Genetics of Complex Life Cycles) and acted as associate editor for the resulting special issue of the Journal of Heredity. I am currently serving on the Board of Directors for a relatively new society, the Society for Modeling and Theory in Population Biology (SMTPB, term to end December 2026).

My association with ASN stretches back to my time as a graduate student, and it is in The American Naturalist that many of my most impactful papers have been disseminated. I served on the ASN Nominations Committee from 2018 to 2022 (Chair in 2020), and was an Associate Editor for The American Naturalist from 2019 to 2021, an experience that was profoundly gratifying, as I was able to support publication of amazing theoretical papers during that time. I’ve also served as a judge for the ASN Outstanding Student Poster Award (previously the ASN Ruth Patrick Student Poster Award), and participated in ASN Symposia at the Evolution meetings, such as the ASN Symposium “The Theory of Evolution” at the 2021 virtual Evolution meeting. I am currently the ASN Representative to the Education and Outreach Committee, which acts as the review and selection committee for the Undergraduate Community at Evolution Program (formerly the Undergraduate Diversity at Evolution Program), a service I began in 2024; my connection with this program is one of my longest service activities, as I served as a mentor to undergraduates at more than 10 Tri-Society meetings, and some of my former undergraduate mentees are now faculty members themselves whom I continue to see at the Evolution meetings.

The American Society of Naturalists occupies an important position in the biological sciences, spanning scientific research across the biological disciplines of evolution, ecology, and behavior, and with a long history of supporting and promoting many types of inquiry, from empirical to theoretical, and including laboratory work and field studies. This breadth is reflected in the society’s motto, which states a goal of enhancing “the conceptual unification of the biological sciences.” To continue this broad work in our current scientific climate, the society needs to continue and expand its mission of supporting the biology research community, promoting the inclusion of scientists from diverse institutions and backgrounds, and publicize the knowledge and appreciation of behavior, ecology, and evolutionary biology to society at large. As ASN president, I would work with ASN membership to develop mechanisms to increase support and access for scientists from institutions we see less often at both our stand-alone meetings and at the larger joint evolution meetings; making sure our awards and programs are accessible and achievable for a wide range of trainees and established scientists will allow us to bring together the broad expanse of expertise we need to make the next important conceptual leap. Across the globe, there are currently many forces threatening both the practice of science, and the natural world we study. Scientific societies, while not engaging in political advocacy, can be strong advocates for science, for education, and for the study and appreciation of the biological world. I would support efforts to expand our membership’s ability to engage via sharing our science in approachable and impactful ways, and by creating resources that translate our work for the general public.

Vice President

The VICE-PRESIDENT organizes the Vice-President’s Symposium for the annual meeting and edits the special supplement to The American Naturalist that contains the papers derived from the VP Symposium. The Vice-President is also the Society’s liaison for the organizers of the annual meeting. The Vice-President serves as a member of the Executive Council for three years, including one year as Vice-President Elect and one year as a Past Vice President.

Megan Frederickson, University of Toronto

I am delighted to put my name forward for the position of Vice President of the American Society of Naturalists. I study mutualism and symbiosis in both host-microbe and plant-animal systems. I have long been fascinated by how the reciprocal benefits exchanged in mutualisms give rise to positive feedback between partners, entangling their ecological and evolutionary fates. Briefly, my research seeks to understand how mutualism and symbiosis evolve and how these interactions affect other ecological and evolutionary processes including community assembly, biological invasions, range dynamics, adaptation, and coevolution. I do this work in plants, insects, and microbes—when it comes to study organisms, the only hard rule in my lab is ‘no bones.’

I received my bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in 2001 and my Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2006, before returning to Harvard as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows from 2006 to 2009. I am Canadian, but between getting my degrees in the US, attending high school in Hong Kong, and my many years of field research in the Peruvian Amazon, I have lived nearly half of my life abroad, which has given me a deep sympathy for international students and scholars, and migrants more generally. In 2009, I was lucky to get a faculty position back in Canada and I am now a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto. I still have a real fondness for California and Massachusetts, though, and I did a sabbatical at UC Davis in 2015–2016 and was a Radcliffe Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard in 2020.

I also have strong ties to academic societies across the US–Canada border, especially the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution (CSEE) and ASN, of course. From 2022 to 2025, I was the Treasurer of CSEE, and I handled the CSEE budget, financial statements, expense reimbursements, insurance, and so on. I have been an Associate Editor at The American Naturalist since 2015 and previously served on the ASN Nominating Committee. Over the years, I have attended most of the ASN stand-alone meetings at Asilomar, where I have judged grad student and postdoc talks, served as a student mentor, and failed spectacularly at trivia night. Beyond academic society work, I have also been on many provincial and federal grant panels in Canada; I am currently on the multidisciplinary review panel for the New Frontiers in Research Fund and I previously co-chaired the Evolution and Ecology evaluation group for the NSERC Discovery Grant program.

I am excited to be considered for the position of ASN Vice President because the ASN community has long been my intellectual ‘home.’ If elected, I would organize a VP symposium on integrating positive interactions into evolutionary medicine—a research area that tends to emphasize antagonisms, especially infectious disease. I would invite speakers working at the interface between ecology and evolutionary biology, microbiome science, and biomedicine. I would also explore ways (e.g., hybrid options) to ensure the full participation of our diverse scientific community at the symposium regardless of citizenship or other constraints on travel to conferences.

Lee Hsiang Liow, University of Oslo

I identify as an evolutionary biologist. I try to harness the power of the fossil record to answer macrevolutionary questions of interest across the paleontological and “contemporary” biology divide. I am concerned about estimating ecologically and evolutionarily relevant parameters that can inform patterns and processes that might cut across vastly different timescales. Although I work on diverse systems that “serve” my research questions, marine invertrebrates, especially bryozoans have a special place in my heart.

I recieved my BSc (Hons) in Zoology from the National University of Singapore in 1996, then completed an MSc in Conservation Biology jointly with the Swedish Agricultural University and Uppsala University in Sweden. I defended my PhD with the Committee for Evolutionary Biology, University of Chicago, in 2006. I am currently a Full Professor and Curator at the National History Museum at University of Oslo in Norway, after a long postdoctoral period at University of Oslo’s Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis. I was awarded a prestigous European Research Council Consolidator Grant in 2017 and am the 2020 recipient of the Charles Schuchert Award from the Paleontological Society, their highest reseach honor given to younger researchers.

I served with the British Ecological Society as a Senior Editor of Methods in Ecology and Evolution from 2017–2022, and am currently serving as an Associate Editor at Ecology Letters, Evolution, and Paleobiology. I have organized many topical symposia, at the annual Geological Society of America (GSA) as well as the European Society for Evolution Biology (ESEB) meetings. These symposia are unified by their aims to build bridges between paleontology and “neontology”, natural history and statistical aproaches, micro- and macroevolution. I also served as an elected broad member of the Volkswagen Foundation funded PaleoSynthesis Centre at FAU Geozentrum Nordbayern, Germany from 2019–2023 and am a current Board Member of EMBO (European Molecular Biology and Evolution, 2024–2027 term).

ASN has a special place in my heart for publishing papers that are careful, in-depth and detailed, supported by an editorial team and reviewer pool that are nothing short of the best. My very first paper in Am. Nat. (2004) was a chapter from my PhD dissertation, and my latest one in 2024, both of which I am proud of, because they went through the tough but thoughtful review process at Am. Nat. I also have painful rejections from Am. Nat., but they only made my admiration for ASN grow and my work better. I am a very fresh member of the ASN (from Jan 2025) and met with some of the people whose science and editorial work I deeply respect for the first time in Asilomar in Jan 2025.

I am excited to be more directly interacting with members of the ASN beginning with my first society meeting last January, after more than two decades of admiring the ASN from a distance. There are currently unprecedented, exciting developments, many led by junior scientists, in linking microevolutionary theory and patterns with macroevolutionary insights and frameworks. If elected, I would be really motivated to organize a VP symposium that stimulates us to link evolutionary and ecological processes that are usually studied on shorter time scales with paleobiological and macroevolutionary patterns and processes that are observed and inferred at much longer timescales. And even though the VP’s role is mainly editorial, I am also invested in helping the ASN grow and remain connected internationally in these turbulent global times. I will strive to help us do the best science we can, not least by nurturing and supporting junior scientists, and giving all of us courage to continue building shared knowledge and promoting curiosity-driven science. Remember the age-old saying: sticks in a bundle are unbreakable.