Robert Ricklefs

Born on June 6, 1943, he grew up near Monterey, California, where his interest in biology was fostered by a teacher. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science from Stanford University in 1963 and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967. His doctoral advisor was originally Robert H. MacArthur (prior to his move to Princeton University), but he finished his dissertation under W. John Smith. During his PhD, he studied avian growth and development, which he continued for much of his career. He completed a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama before taking up a faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania. He was the 1982 recipient of the American Ornithologists' Union's William Brewster Memorial Award, the union's most prestigious award given annually for an exceptional body of work on birds of the Western Hemisphere. In 2003, he received the Pacific Seabird Group's Lifetime Achievement Award for his work on growth and development in seabirds. He was awarded the 2003 Margaret Morse Nice Medal by the Wilson Ornithological Society. He was the 2006 recipient of the Cooper Ornithological Society’s Loye and Alden Miller Research Award, which is given in recognition of lifetime achievement in ornithological research.

Assistant Professor, Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, 1968–1972

Associate Professor, Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, 1972–1978

Professor, Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania, 1978–1995

Curators’ Professor, Department of Biology, University of Missouri-St. Louis, 1995–2019

Ricklefs was married to the botanist Susanne Renner. He died on June 7, 2026, at the age of 83.