Jeffrey S. Levinton, Distinguished Professor Ph.D., Yale University, 1971 Marine benthic ecology, macroevolution Email: Jeffrey.Levinton@stonybrook.edu Office: LS680 Phone:  (631)632-8602 Lab Website: Lab Website and Tributes from Students and Postdocs on Jeff's Retirement

Research Summary:

Jeffrey Levinton has done research on a wide variety of topics, all in the general area of marine ecology. A major interest is in relating feeding biology of marine bottom animals to population and community-level processes. He is currently involved in a study of the role of thermal and hydric stress in the ecology of fiddler crab species living over broad latitudinal thermal regimes, to study the role of climate change in the role of thermal stress on performance. He has worked on feeding selectivity in bivalves, most recently on the mechanisms of suspension-feeding in bivalves, using flow cytometry and video endoscopy. He also worked on the evolution of resistance to toxic substances and physiological adaptation of growth strategies to temperature regimes in copepods and polychaetes, stressing models of metabolic adaptation. Levinton has also done research on rate of evolution in the fossil record and maintains a strong interest in paleobiology. His students have worked on related research topics, but also on grazing in coral reefs, chemical defense, rocky shore ecology and diverse themes.

Levinton was a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fulbright Senior Scholar and is the author of a major text in marine biology, a compendium of research on the Hudson River Estuary, and a monograph on macroevolution. He has served as an editor for The American Naturalist, Ecology, Ecological Applications, Global Change Ecology, and was head of the Hudson River Fund Panel of the Hudson River Foundation. He is now member of the Advancement Board of Friday Harbor Laboratories, the New York State Shellfish Council, member of the outreach committee of the Mid-Atlantic Coastal Acidification Network.