Dr. Simberloff was appointed to UT Knoxville’s Nancy Gore Hunger Chair of Excellence in Environmental Studies in 1997. He came to UT from Florida State University, where he was the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor in Biology. He earned both the baccalaureate degree (1964) and the PhD (1969) from Harvard. He was the recipient of the Ecological Society of America’s Mercer Award in 1971 and its Eminent Ecologist Award in 2006. He was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993. In 2012 he became the third UT Knoxville faculty member to be inducted into the National Academy of Sciences and also was the recipient of the world’s preeminent prize for ecology and environmental science, the Ramon Margalef Award for Ecology. He established the Institute for Biological Invasions at UT in 1997.
Simberloff has authored over 350 publications, and was coeditor of the Encyclopedia of Biological Invasions. Among his many professional activities, he served as associate editor of the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, as a member of the National Science Board, a member of the NMFS Recovery Science Review Panel, on the editorial board of BioScience, and the editorial board of Biological Invasions.