Astrid Groot

ISCE Silverstein-Simeone Award

Astrid Groot is professor and department head Evolutionary and Population Biology (EPB) at the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED) at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), and investigates how sexual communication systems in moths evolve and contribute to speciation. She received her PhD at Wageningen University in 2000, after which she was postdoc in the labs of Coby Schal and Fred Gould at North Carolina State University (NCSU), where her current research focus developed. After receiving a New Investigators grant of USDA in 2005 to study intraspecific variation in moth sex pheromones, she was promoted to research assistant professor at NCSU. In 2007 she moved to Germany to become group leader in the Entomology department at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology (MPICE) led by David Heckel, but stayed affiliated to NCSU and continues to collaborate with Coby Schal to this day. In March 2011 she received a MacGillavry fellowship at the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED), University of Amsterdam, and combined her appointment at UvA with her appointment at MPICE until 2021, and still collaborates closely with David Heckel. In 2017 she was promoted to full professor and in 2018 she became department head of one of the four departments of IBED. One of her most recent papers is the result of 21 years of collaborative research between NCSU, MPICE and UvA. She has been ISCE member since 1995 and from 2014 to 2018 she was council member of ISCE. From 2015 to 2023 she was also secretary of the Royal Dutch Zoological Society and in 2021 she was elected president of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB). She is columnist in the Dutch newsletter for Biologists (Bionieuws) and part of the Nose network (nosenetwork.nl). Together with researchers of Odeuropa, she wrote the popular science book ‘Neuswijzer’ (freely translated to “Nose-wiser”) an “Odor atlas of the Low Lands”, which came out in October ’23 and is now in its second edition.