Dr. Kamalijit (Kamal) S. Bawa
Professor Kamal S. Bawa (b. 1939) is an evolutionary ecologist and a conservation biologist. Bawa obtained his doctoral degree form Panjab University, India in 1967. He has held Bullard and Cabot Fellowships at Harvard University, and has also been named a Guggenheim Fellow as well as a Pew Scholar. Currently Bawa is a Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.
Dr. Bawa is the editor-in-chief of Conservation and Society, an interdisciplinary journal in conservation, and also serves on the editorial boards of several other journals. He has served on many national and international advisory panels.
Kamal Bawa’s concern for global conservation issues led him to establish new institutions for conservation and sustainability science and new models for international cooperation in fostering sustainability. Among Bawa’s most significant achievements is the establishment of the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) in Bangalore, India, in 1996. This innovative, knowledge-based conservation and research organization was designed to scale up models of and approaches to sustainability science. He is also a founder-trustee of the Center for Interdisciplinary studies in Environment and Development, Bangalore, India.
Kamal Bawa was among the first to consider the role of resource allocation and sexual selection in the evolution of plant breeding systems and he advanced new mechanisms for the evolution of almost every major type of breeding system in plants.
