Brian Enquist receives Robert H. MacArthur Award
by the Santa Fe Institute
June 2, 2026
SFI External Professor Brian Enquist (University of Arizona) has been awarded the Ecological Society of America’s prestigious Robert H. MacArthur Award.
The award recognizes a mid-career ecologist for “meritorious contributions to ecology, in expectation of continued outstanding research.”
The Society recognizes Enquist, an ecologist and macroecologist, for his work linking functional traits in organisms to the structure and functioning of communities and ecosystems; developing quantitative tools that advance understanding of ecological organization across scales; and, in early collaboration with SFI’s James Brown and Geoffrey West, advancing Metabolic Scaling Theory to identify parallels between plant vascular systems and animal cardiovascular systems. More recently, and in collaboration with SFI’s Van Savage and colleagues, Enquist has built on that work to co-develop the Trait Driver Theory, which extends ideas from adaptive dynamics and quantitative genetics. It provides a predictive framework for how trait variation in individuals, species, and communities scales up to impact ecosystems and the dynamics of biodiversity across space and time.
Keep reading: https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/brian-enquist-receives-robert-h-macarthur-award
Read the ESA announcement: https://esa.org/blog/2026/05/06/ecological-society-of-america-announces-2026-award-recipients/