ORONO — University of Maine ecology professor Brian McGill has been named a 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow, one of the highest honors in the scientific community.
AAAS Fellows are a group of scientists, engineers and innovators recognized for their achievements across disciplines, from research, teaching and technology, to administration in academia, industry and government, to excellence in communicating and interpreting science to the public.
Other AAAS Fellows from UMaine have included Susan Brawley, professor emerita of plant biology and marine ecology and 2012 AAAS Fellow; Joyce Longcore, research professor of fungal pathogens and 2012 AAAS Fellow; Daniel Sandweiss, professor of anthropology and climate studies and 2014 AAAS Fellow; and R. Dean Astumian, professor of physics and 2016 AAAS Fellow; and Heather Leslie, professor of marine sciences and 2022 AAAS Fellow.
“I am grateful to have my research recognized by this honorary fellowship. I’ve been lucky to have great collaborators and students throughout. I take this recognition as a challenge to do bolder, more innovative research and teaching to find the solutions so badly needed to enable humans to successfully coexist with nature before irreversible changes happen,” McGill said.
McGill studies biodiversity at large scales of space and time across many species. His ideas have a wide-ranging impact in his field of macroecology.
McGill’s work established the importance of prediction in ecology and identified unifying principles in the field. He also pioneered solutions to conceptual issues in his discipline related to the widely-used and vaguely-defined term biodiversity. He and his colleagues developed a series of scientifically measurable concepts to resolve this long-standing source of ambiguity in the field of ecology and provided concrete tools to better measure and assess biodiversity in management contexts.
Through the blog “Dynamic Ecology,” McGill and two co-authors shape the way research is conducted in labs across the planet and provide mentorship globally on successfully navigating academic cultures. The blog, with as many as 700,000 visits per year, is the most widely read in academic ecology.
In addition to being named a AAAS Fellow, McGill was named one of the most cited researchers in the world in 2019, 2020 and 2021 by Web of Science. His research is also featured in textbooks from high school to the graduate level.
McGill is a lifetime honorary fellow of the Ecological Society of America, which is bestowed to approximately 250 of the organization’s 9,000 members. In 2023, he was awarded the Humboldt Research Award, one of the most prestigious scientific honors in Germany. He also received the UMaine Presidential Research and Creative Achievement award in 2024, 2020 Outstanding Faculty Research Award from what is today UMaine’s College of Earth, Life, and Health Sciences.
McGill, whose lab is part of the Maine Agricultural and Forest Experiment Station, has been a faculty member in the School of Biology and Ecology since 2010. He also holds a joint appointment in the Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions and a cooperating appointment in the Climate Change Institute. He served until recently as editor-in-chief of Global Ecology and Biogeography and formerly as associate editor of Frontiers of Ecology and Environment, American Naturalist, and Global Ecology and Biogeography.
