Paul R. Ehrlich - Life and Career

Life and Career

Ehrlich was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Ruth (Rosenberg) and William Ehrlich, a salesman. His father was a shirt salesman, his mother a Greek and Latin scholar. He earned a bachelors degree in zoology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1953, an M.A. at the University of Kansas in 1955, and a Ph.D. in 1957 at the University of Kansas, supervised by the prominent bee researcher C.D. Michener. During his studies he participated in surveys of insects on the Bering Sea and in the Canadian Arctic, and then with a National Institutes of Health fellowship, investigated the genetics and behavior of parasitic mites. In 1959 he joined the faculty at Stanford, being promoted to professor of biology in 1966. He was named to the Bing Professorship in 1977, and he is president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University. Additionally, Ehrlich is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the United States National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Ehrlich continues to perform policy research concerning population and resource issues, emphasizing especially endangered species, cultural evolution, environmental ethics, and the preservation of genetic resources. Along with Dr. Gretchen Daily, he has performed work in countryside biogeography, or the study of making human-disturbed areas hospitable to biodiversity. His research group at Stanford researches extensively natural populations of the Bay checkerspot butterfly(Euphydryas).

He has been married to Anne H. Ehrlich (born Anne Fitzhugh Howland, 1933) since 1954; he and Anne have one child, Lisa Marie.