UM Regents professor Allendorf elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

University of Montana Regents professor of biology Emeritus, Fred Allendorf, was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Allendorf is one of more than 200 new members who constitute the Academy’s 239th class, which is made up of some of the world’s most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers and artists, as well as civic, business and philanthropic leaders.

Allendorf is just the second member of the academy ever elected from any Montana institution. Doug Emlen, a UM biology professor, was elected to the AAAS in 2016.

“I am honored to receive this recognition of my work,” Allendorf said. “I look forward to contributing to the Academy's mission of providing practical solutions to complex challenges that we are facing.”

Allendorf is one of a handful of people who founded the field of conservation genetics. He was one of the first to apply genetics to real-world conservation problems, and he has continued to advance the application of genetics, and now genomics, to pressing conservation issues.

His research focuses on the application of population and evolutionary genetics to challenges in conservation biology. His book “Conservation and the Genetics of Populations,” co-written with UM Professor Gordon Luikart and Sally Aitken of the University of British Columbia, provides an understanding of how genetics can be used to conserve species threatened with extinction.

In 2018 Allendorf was recognized as one of the world’s most highly cited researchers by Clarivate Analytics. The journal Molecular Ecology awarded Allendorf its 2015 Molecular Ecology Prize.

Along with holding his emeritus rank at UM, Allendorf is a Professorial Research Fellow at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. He was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Aarhus in Denmark and at Nottingham University in England.

He also was a Senior Fulbright Fellow at Victoria University of Wellington and has held positions at the University of California, Davis; the University of Oregon; the University of Minnesota; and the University of Western Australia.

“Fred’s influence as a scientist has been tremendous because of his far-reaching vision of how genetic data can be used to address fundamental questions in the conservation of plants and animals, combined with his extremely high standards of scientific rigor and integrity, “ said Creagh Breuner, UM associate dean in the Division of Biological Sciences.