Anurag Agrawal (ecologist)

Anurag Agrawal is an American professor of ecology, evolutionary biology, and entomology who has written over a 150 peer-reviewed articles, which earned him an h-index of 92. He is the author of a popular science book, Monarchs and Milkweeds from Princeton University Press, and is currently the James Alfred Perkins Professor of Environmental Studies at Cornell University.

Life

Agrawal was born in 1972 in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He obtained both BA in biology and an MA in conservation biology from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia after working with Daniel Janzen. In 1999, he earned a Ph.D. in population biology from the University of California, Davis. He then became a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Amsterdam. A year later, he became an assistant professor at the University of Toronto in the former department of botany. Since 2004, he has been a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Department of Entomology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He publishes with a fictitious middle initial, and is sometimes confused with Canadian evolutionary biologist Aneil Agrawal.

His work is focused on the ecology and evolution of plant-insect interactions, including aspects of herbivory, community ecology, phenotypic plasticity, chemical ecology, coevolution, and phylogenetics. His current research includes work on New York state's biodiversity, the ecology of invasive plants, the biology of monarch butterflies, and the evolution of plant defense strategies. In addition to many scientific papers, his recent book Monarchs and Milkweeds has received acclaim from a wide audience, including the National Outdoor Book Award.