By: David Campbell
Professors Peter and Rosemary Grant of Princeton University’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology have been named recipients of the Balzan Prize for their work in population biology, Princeton has announced.
The International Balzan Foundation annually awards four prizes for scientific and academic excellence. Each prize is valued at 1 million Swiss francs about $800,000 and winners are expected to earmark half of the money for future projects to be carried out by young researchers.
The awards ceremony will take place Nov. 11 in the Swiss Houses of Parliament in Bern.
The Grants were selected for "their remarkable long-term studies demonstrating evolution in action in Galapagos finches," according to the foundation. "The work of the Grants has had a seminal influence in the fields of population biology, evolution and ecology."
Professor Peter Grant is the Class of 1877 Professor of Zoology at Princeton, and Rosemary Grant is a lecturer and senior research biologist at the university.
For three decades, the couple have traveled to the Galapagos Islands off the coast of South America to study the various species of finch that influenced Charles Darwin when formulating his theory of evolution. The Grants conduct research on how the finches have changed as a result of dramatic climatic differences.
They received the E.O. Wilson Prize of the American Society of Naturalists in 1998, the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society of London in 2002 and the Grinnell Award of the University of California-Berkeley in 2003. They are members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the General Assembly of the Charles Darwin Foundation.
Since 1961, 106 scientists, scholars, artists and institutions have been honored with the Balzan Prize, including Mother Teresa, the Nobel Foundation and Paul Hindemith. Previous Princeton winners include historians Charles Gillispie and Anthony Grafton.

