Michael Hochberg - mystery and our pivotal moments, innovation, and science from cells to societies

Michael Hochberg is Distinguished Research Director with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (the French National Centre for Scientific Research) and based at the University of Montpellier, France. His research has for many years spanned fields from ecology to epidemiology to biodiversity to innovation to the communication of science and touches every scale imaginable, from cells to societies.

The insight and wisdom he has built up from a career spent in these liminal spaces is exhilarating and has placed him at the frontier of scientific inquiry that centers the in-between spaces, such as complexity science. As part of that pursuit, Michael enjoys associate positions at the Santa Fe Institute and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse.

He uses mathematical models and experiments to unravel complex ecological interactions, social and cultural dynamics, and pathways of innovation and their evolution; his work is profoundly important to our world as we navigate global health and ecological crises and entertain an insatiable curiosity for invention and innovation.

Michael is the author of two books: Aspects of the Genesis and Maintenance of Biological Diversity and An Editor's Guide to Writing and Publishing Science based on his decade-long experience founding and serving as Editor in Chief for the journal Ecology Letters. He is currently section head of population ecology at the Faculty of 1000 and director of the French Darwinian Evolution of Cancer Consortium.

Michael received his BSc in bioresource sciences at the University of California Berkeley in 1982, MSc in entomological sciences in 1985, PhD in pure and applied biology at the University of London in 1989. He was postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Population Biology at Imperial College from 1989 to 1991.