Naomi Pierce awarded Lifetime Achievement Award

Congratulations to Naomi Pierce, Hessel Professor of Biology in OEB and Curator of Lepidoptera in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, winner of the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for the Study of Evolution.

Pierce's work focuses on the evolution of species interactions, and features a broad range of taxa, including plants, microbes, fungi, and many insect species, especially those that associate symbiotically with ants. To make sense of behavioral and ecological information, she has long championed an evolutionary approach, and has accordingly been a core contributor to attempts to reconstruct the phylogeny of major groups of insects, including ants, bees and butterflies. Part of Pierce's lifetime achievement includes her long teaching career at Oxford, Princeton, and Harvard where she has mentored and trained hundreds of undergraduates, PhD students and postdoctoral fellows from around the world.

Pierce will present her work in the Lifetime Achievement Award talk at the 2026 Evolution meeting.