Bill Kunin

Biography

Bill Kunin graduated in Biology from Princeton, received a Masters Degree in Public Policy at Harvard, and a Ph.D. in Zoology at the University of Washington in Seattle. He moved to Britain to take a postdoctoral position at the Centre for Population Biology at Imperial College, and moved to Leeds to take up a lectureship in ecology in 1996. He was promoted to become Reader in spatial ecology in 2006. He lives in a pink house in the suburbs with his wife, Helen Lewis, and their two sets of twins, Nat, Miriam, Toby and Sam.

Research Interest

Spatial aspects of population and community ecology and conservation biology I am interested in rare species and the factors that influence their populations: their interactions with their environment and with the species that compete with them and feed upon them. I focus particularly on plant populations, and on their interactions with insect herbivores and pollinators. Much of my work has relied on manipulative field experiments in which I have set up controlled populations of plants and investigated the effect on pollination and herbivory. These experiments have highlighted strong positive effects of population density on pollination, while effects on herbivores varies greatly, raising interesting questions for future research.