Stuart West
Congratulations to Stuart West, the recipient of the 2025 ASN Conceptual Unification Award. For the last three decades, Professor Stuart West has transformed evolutionary thinking across the field of symbiosis, cooperation, sex allocation, division of labor, spite, and signaling. West’s success has stemmed from his aim to achieve interdisciplinary unification. His theory is data-driven, his empirical work is theory-driven, and data from one taxon inspires his research on other taxa—this is interdisciplinary science at its best. He actively applies fundamental concepts to new areas of biology, including social evolution theory to microorganisms, signaling theory to bacteria, and behavioral ecology methodology to humans. West is a field biologist, a laboratory experimentalist, a theoretician, a comparative biologist, and a bioinformatician. As a result, West’s reviews have unified work on the evolution of cooperation across the tree of life and provided research agendas for taxa where cooperation had previously been little studied. West has driven fundamental advances in our understanding of how behavior and life histories evolve in response to ecological variation across the tree of life. Finally, West has a strong record of mentoring young scientists to success. His mentorship at Oxford has been recognized at Oxford with an Outstanding Research Supervision Award, and West has authored a book on scientific writing for the life sciences, aimed at early career researchers.
The ASN Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Conceptual Unification of the Biological Sciences is given annually to honor relatively senior but still active investigators who are making fundamental contributions to the Society's goals in promoting the conceptual unification of the biological sciences.
The ASN thanks committee members Dr. Jen Lau, Dr. Mike McCoy, and Dr. Emilie Snell-Rood for evaluating candidates.