Robert Mitchell Pringle (born February 9, 1979) is an American biologist and conservationist. He is professor and director of undergraduate studies in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

. Pringle's research combines field and laboratory methods to understand biological interactions and biodiversity loss in terrestrial ecosystems, chiefly African savannas. One major focus of Pringle's work has been understanding the ecological impacts of armed conflict and the dynamics of postwar ecosystem restoration in Mozambique’s

Gorongosa National Park Gorongosa National Park is at the southern end of the Great African Rift Valley in the heart of central Mozambique, Southeast Africa. The more than park comprises the valley floor and parts of surrounding plateaus. Rivers originating on nearby M ...

Early life and education

Pringle was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His father, cell biologist John Pringle, and mother, cancer biologist Beverly Mitchell, encouraged his love of nature. Pringle’s sister, Elizabeth, is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Nevada, Reno. Pringle graduated from the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

in 2001, completed an M.Sc. degree at the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

in 2004, and received a Ph.D. in biology from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

in 2009. He was a Junior Fellow in the

Harvard Society of Fellows The Society of Fellows is a group of scholars selected at the beginnings of their careers by Harvard University for their potential to advance academic wisdom, upon whom are bestowed distinctive opportunities to foster their individual and intell ...

before joining the Princeton faculty in 2012.

Career

Pringle's early research experimentally documented the keystone roles played by large herbivores, carnivores, and subterranean termites in regulating biodiversity and ecosystem function in savannas. In 2013, Pringle's lab was among the first to use

DNA metabarcoding Metabarcoding is the DNA barcoding, barcoding of DNA/RNA (or Environmental DNA, eDNA/Environmental DNA, eRNA) in a manner that allows for the simultaneous identification of many taxa within the same sample. The main difference between barcodi ...

to understand dietary niche differentiation and its role in sustaining the coexistence of animal species. Pringle also worked with Princeton colleagues Corina Tarnita and Juan Bonachela to develop new theories about the formation of large, regular vegetation patterns, such as the Namib Desert fairy circles. Pringle's work in Gorongosa has focused on measuring the ecological and evolutionary impacts of losing large herbivores and carnivores, as well as the dynamics of community reassembly as these species have been restored. This research was featured in the Emmy Award nominated nature documentary, Nature’s Fear Factor. Pringle serves on the board of the Guanacaste Dry Forest Conservation Fund, a nonprofit organization supporting conservation and biodiversity research in Costa Rica’s Area de Conservación Guanacaste. With Simon Levin and Corina Tarnita, he is the editor of the ''Monographs in Population Biology'' published by Princeton University Press, a series of influential books in ecology and evolutionary biology.

Recognition

Pringle received the Early Career Investigator Award from the American Society of Naturalists in 2011 and was named an Early Career Fellow of the Ecological Society of America in 2015. Students at Princeton have described Pringle as a passionate and creative teacher. The parasitoid wasp Lytopylus robpringlei was named after Pringle in 2011, in honor of his conservation work. This species was later transferred into the genus Aerophilus. In 2024, Pringle was named a

Guggenheim Fellow Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

Personal life

Pringle is married to Corina Tarnita, a mathematician and biologist who is also a professor at Princeton. Pringle and Tarnita have collaborated on multiple research projects, and they have one daughter.

References

External links

Pringle Laboratory Lab homepage

Profile on the Website of the High Meadows Environmental Institute

Profile on the Website of Princeton’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
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Niche partitioning and species coexistence Video on YouTube

Think Like a Scientist: Gorongosa Video

Nature’s Fear Factor PBS NOVA documentary

Guggenheim Foundation profile
21st-century American biologists American ecologists Ecologists American evolutionary biologists Conservation biologists Princeton University faculty Harvard Fellows Stanford University alumni Alumni of the University of Oxford University of Pennsylvania alumni 1979 births Living people {{Improve categories, date=February 2023 Lists of Guggenheim Fellowships