SSE Council is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, Dr. Naomi Pierce!
Naomi Pierce is the Hessel Professor of Biology and Curator of Lepidoptera in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. Her 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. Her research combines field work (mainly in Asia, Australia, and Kenya) with laboratory analysis. To make sense of behavioral and ecological information, Pierce 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. This research has been facilitated by the extensive collections held at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, including tens of thousands of specimens that Pierce and her students have deposited there as part of their work. Her approach is characterized by an old-fashioned appreciation of natural history analyzed using state-of-the-art molecular and ecological tools. Over her long teaching career at Oxford, Princeton, and Harvard, Pierce has mentored and trained hundreds of undergraduates, PhD students and postdoctoral fellows from around the world.
Dr. Pierce will present her work in the Lifetime Achievement Award talk at the 2026 Evolution meeting.
![[P]](http://evolutionsociety.org/images/icons/extrasmall/printer.png "Printer-friendly page"){kind=icon}