Somerville College wishes to take this opportunity to celebrate the work and achievements of Professor Loeske Kruuk (Somerville 1988, Maths).
Professor Kruuk is a ground-breaking evolutionary ecologist and Royal Society Research Professor currently based at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Biological Sciences. She was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society in 2023, on which happy occasion Loeske was delighted to encounter a bust of Mary Somerville, the pioneering Victorian polymath for whom Somerville College is named and an inspiration to Loeske since her student days.
Professor Loeske Kruuk
Professor Kruuk was elected FRS for her internationally recognised research on evolutionary and ecological processes in wild animal populations. Her work has pioneered the analysis of quantitative genetics in natural populations and its use in testing fundamental evolutionary theory. In particular, her use of long-term studies of individual life-history and genetic data have demonstrated substantial potential for ongoing evolutionary adaptation and responses to natural selection, especially those related to a warming climate.
Professor Kruuk read Mathematics at Somerville College as an undergraduate, before migrating to the biological sciences. She completed her PhD in population genetics at the University of Edinburgh, followed by a post-doctoral research position at the University of Cambridge. It was during Professor Kruuk’s time in Cambridge that she joined the Isle of Rum red deer project, and she has been working on long-term studies of wild animal populations ever since.
Somerville College’s plaster cast of Chantrey’s marble bust of Mary Somerville, which still resides at the Royal Society.
Professor Kruuk held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh before moving to the Australian National University in 2012 for an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, and then a Laureate Fellowship. She returned to Edinburgh in 2021 on her current Royal Society Research Professorship prior to her election to the Fellowship in 2023. Among her many accolades, Professor Kruuk is the recipient of the Presidents’ Award of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology, the Mary Lyon Medal of the Genetics Society and the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London.
Professor Kruuk has long been an advocate for academic caregivers and for much of her career worked part-time while raising her three children. As co-editor of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B journal she prepared a Special Feature issue in 2022 of articles by female scientists juggling academic work with home care and home schooling during Covid.
Loeske has recently fallen seriously ill, but she will always be extremely grateful to Somerville for the strong start it gave her in academic life, and for the love and support of life-long Somerville friends.