Arizona State University
USA
Dr. Fewell is President’s Professor at Arizona State University, and Faculty Leader for the Organismal, Integrative and Systems Biology group in the School of Life Sciences. She received her PhD in 1988 at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research focuses on the organization and evolution of insect societies, particularly on the roles of self-organization and selection in shaping cooperative social groups. In current work, she examines the role that self-organization plays in the transition from solitary to group living, and again as groups scale up in size. She primarily works on harvester ants, but she has studied the social organization of a range of other cooperative groups, from sweat bees to NBA basketball teams.
With a strong interest in interdisciplinary synthesis, she led the effort to build the Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity at ASU, and served as its founding director from 2005-2009. The center brings together biological, social and mathematical scientists to examine issues of social complexity. She also serves on the board of the German Interdisciplinary Kolleg (IK). She was President of the North American Section of IUSSI in 1998, and an Executive Board member of the Animal Behavior Society from 2002-2007. At ASU, she served as President of the Faculty Women’s Association, and has won awards for her work in mentoring and advocacy. She was named an ASU “exemplar” in 2008, was a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow, and is currently a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.