Andrew V. Suarez, Ph.D., professor of entomology and Jeffrey S. Elowe Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of Illinois, was elected Fellow in 2025.
He received a B.S. in ecology, ethology, and evolution in 1991 and an M.S. in biology in 1994 from the University of Illinois. He spent the next nine years in California, where he received his Ph.D. from the University of California (UC) San Diego in 2000, was a USDA postdoc at UC Davis, and was a Miller postdoc at UC Berkeley. In 2003, he returned to Illinois as faculty.
His research program capitalizes on the developmental and ecological flexibility of ants to examine a wide variety of topics, including the causes and consequences of biological invasions, the evolution of body size variation, and the evolution of behavioral and morphological specialization. His recent work has focused on the ecology and biomechanics of trap-jaw ants. Suarez has published more than 100 articles on ants that have accumulated over 20,000 citations.
Suarez has received numerous campus teaching awards for his courses, in which insects are always heavily featured. He was also a co-instructor of the Ant Course, an international field course on ant taxonomy and systematics. His administrative experience at Illinois includes being director of the program in ecology, evolution, and conservation; head of the Department of Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior, and acting head of the Department of Entomology.