Claire Spottiswoode elected a Fellow of the Royal Society - May 2025

Prof. Claire Spottiswoode, who holds the Pola Pasvolsky Chair in Conservation Biology at the Fitz, has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. She joins seven other Fellows from Africa, three of whom are from UCT, and is one of the approximately 90 'outstanding researchers' elected to the Fellowship from around the world this year, two of whom are from Africa.

Claire is an evolutionary biologist and naturalist with a particular interest in the ecology, evolution and conservation of species interactions. She runs two long-term field projects on African birds: in southern Zambia, on the coevolution between brood-parasitic birds and the hosts they exploit to raise their young, and in northern Mozambique, on the mutually beneficial interactions between honeyguides and the human honey-hunters with whom they cooperate to gain access to bees’ nests. Both projects involve close collaboration with the local communities.

In addition to the Pola Pasvolsky Chair, Claire is also a Visiting Research Associate in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge in the UK and Co-Director of the Max Planck–UCT Centre for Behaviour and Coevolution, established in 2024 in collaboration with Prof. Dr Bart Kempenaers and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence in Germany.

The FitzPatrick Institute congratulates Claire on this outstanding and well-deserved achievement! 

Some facts about the Fellowship

Fellows of the Royal Society are elected 'for life through a peer review process on the basis of excellence in science'.

Of the approximately 1800 Fellows, 85 are Nobel Laureates.

Find Claire on the Royal Society website

Claire’s bio on the Royal Society’s Fellows Directory: https://royalsociety.org/people/claire-spottiswoode-10608/