Loeske Kruuk

Professor Loeske Kruuk did an undergraduate degree in mathematics at the University of Oxford, but soon realised (after a year in Australia following her undergraduate degree) that biology might be more interesting. She completed a PhD in population genetics at the University of Edinburgh, UK, in 1997, and then did a postdoc at the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh, working on a long-term study of red deer; the postdoc introduced her to the use of quantitative genetics in wild populations to ask questions about evolutionary ecology. Since then she has been lucky enough to be involved in studies of a range of taxa, using individual-level field data to investigate evolutionary ecology and evolutionary quantitative genetics.

Professor Kruuk started a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh in 2000, and became Professor of Evolutionary Ecology there in 2009. In 2012, she took up an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship at the Australian National University.

She won the UK Genetics Society Mary Lyons Medal in 2015, the Zoological Society of London Scientific Medal in 2008, and a Phillip Leverhulme Prize in 2006. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2009 and a Fellow of the European Molecular Biology Organisation in 2014, and is currently an Editor for the Proceedings of the Royal Society London Series B.

She has three children (a daughter and twin boys), and has worked part-time since the birth of her daughter in 2004.