He would move so easily, so seamlessly, from economics to molecular genetics to political theory to biology. He pulled it together so effortlessly and then would bring in some very practical observations. For over two decades, Levins, the John Rock Professor of Population Sciences, has been one of the intellectual giants of the School. A founding theoretician of evolutionary ecology and one of the world s most brilliant biomathematicians, Levins has applied ideas from these fields to the problems of disease causation, particularly infectious disease. In over-simplified terms, he is a scholar of, and advocate for, an ecological approach to public health.
Physicists have an aesthetic for symmetry and simplicity.
My own aesthetic is for complexity, anomaly and, asymmetry. Levins scientific views are also guided by a philosophical outlook rooted in Hegel and Marx that eschews the modern tendency to break systems into their smallest identifiable parts. Instead, Levins sees the world as an ever-moving process and looks for patterns in the whole. When someone asks me what Richard specializes in, I answer, complex systems, says Pamela Anderson, SM '84, SD '91, a Colombia-based researcher and consultant in the School s Department of International Health and Population Sciences and someone who has prized Levins as a mentor for a decade. Richard applies his integrated, quantitative, and qualitative thinking on complex systems to all these arenas.