Leslie Aiello

Leslie Aiello is President Emerita of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and Professor Emerita, University College London. Her academic interests focus on the evolution of human adaptation as well as on the broader issues of evolutionary theory, life history, energetics, and the evolution of the brain and cognition. She received her B.A. and M.A. in anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles and her Ph.D. in human evolution and anatomy from the University of London. She spent the majority of her 30-year university career at University College London (UCL) where she was Professor of Biological Anthropology (1995-2005), Head of the UCL Anthropology Department (1996-2002), and Head of the UCL Graduate School (2002-2005). She was President of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (2005-2017), co-managing editor of the Journal of Human Evolution (1993-1999) and President of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (2018-2019). Throughout her career she has been active with the media in the public dissemination of science and particularly human evolution. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and of the British Academy (Corresponding Fellow). She is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society, and has served as an officer for a number of anthropological and scientific societies and as a consultant and advisor to a variety of international anthropological institutions and initiatives. She is currently on the Board of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, was the 2006 Huxley Memorial Medalist and Lecturer (Royal Anthropological Institute), the 2020 Osman Hill Medalist (Primate Society of Great Britain), and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Alcalá, Spain in 2016.