Mary Jane West-Eberhard

Mary Jane West-Eberhard (born 1941) is an American theoretical biologist noted for arguing that phenotypic and developmental plasticity played a key role in shaping animal evolution and speciation. She is also an entomologist notable for her work on the behavior and evolution of social wasps.

She is a member both of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2005 she was elected to be a foreign member of the Italian Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. She has been a past president (1991) of the Society for the Study of Evolution. She won the 2003 R.R. Hawkins Award for the Outstanding Professional, Reference or Scholarly Work for her book Developmental Plasticity and Evolution (618 pages). In the same year she was the recipient of the Sewall Wright Award. She has been selected as one of the 21 "Leaders in Animal Behavior".

She is engaged in long term research projects at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute at the Escuela de Biologia, Universidad de Costa Rica.

West-Eberhard’s mother was a primary school teacher, and her father, a small-town businessman, and as parents they encouraged her curiosity. She recalls of her high school that the best scientific training “was an English course on critical reading and writing, taught by the school librarian. Biology class was just a workbook, an enormous disappointment for me.”

She did all her degrees at the University of Michigan. There she was taught by Richard D. Alexander and had part-time employment in its Museum of Zoology. She records that “I also learned the excitement of being a sleuth in the university libraries where even an undergraduate could explore an idea beyond textbooks and could feel like a pioneer”. She also corresponded with Edward Wilson on trophic eggs in insects, and spent summers at Woods Hole and Cali in Colombia.