Ruth Geyer Shaw

Ruth Geyer Shaw (born 1953) at the University of Minnesota. She studies the processes involved in genetic variation, specializing in plant population biology and evolutionary quantitative genetics. She has received several awards including the 2017 Sewall Wright Award from the American Society of Naturalists, given to a senior investigator who continues to make fundamental contributions to "the conceptual unification of the biological sciences".

Early life Shaw's parent were both chemists and she grew up in Pennsylvania. Shaw has stated that they fostered her interested in the natural world by going on nature walks and consulting field guides to identify plants and birds. working with Janis Antonovics.

Career Shaw was an assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside from 1987 to 1992. Shaw was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018 and into the National Academy of Sciences in 2021.

Research Shaw is an evolutionary biologist, who studies evolutionary change in nature. She is concerned with stressors such as climate change and population fragmentation and their effects on evolutionary change in populations.

In much of her work Shaw has focused on evolutionary processes in plant populations. She uses techniques from quantitative genetics and population biology as well as field experiments to study the evolution of plants such as Echinacea angustifolia. Through empirical studies, she examines evolutionary change in its ecological context. By studying Echinacea angustifolia, she has demonstrated that inbreeding, which frequently affects fragmented populations, can influence key functional traits. Traits related to plant structure, physiology and elemental composition are important to individual fitness and ecological dynamics in populations.

With Margaret Bryan Davis and others, Shaw has examined Paleoclimate change in North American forests, from the Quaternary period onwards. Pollen granules and other plant remains, found in lake sediment cores, can show changes in populations in an area over time. In 2011, Davis, Shaw and Julie R. Etterson received the William Skinner Cooper Award from the Ecological Society of America for the paper "Evolutionary responses to changing climate". In this paper, they synthesized ecological and evolutionary research about plant populations and the effects of rapid climate change, challenging the paradigm that evolutionary responses in the Quaternary period were slow and ineffective. The evidence they presented suggests that evolutionary adaptation does occur in plant populations subjected to the stress of rapid environmental change. Aster Modeling enables the analysis of life history data to obtain estimates of fitness and population growth rates. The importance of Shaw's work on quantitative genetics and analysis of fitness was recognized in 2009 when the American Society of Naturalists gave its President's Award to the paper Unifying Life‐History Analyses for Inference of Fitness and Population Growth. Shaw has also developed Quercus, a quantitative genetics software, that performs a maximum likelihood analysis of variance of quantitative genetic data.

Mentoring Shaw advises graduate students in the departments of Applied Plant Sciences; Conservation Biology; Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior; and Plant Biological Sciences at the University of Minnesota. 2018, American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellow of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior 2017, Sewall Wright Award from the American Society of Naturalists 2011, Inaugural Outstanding Adviser Award from the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior (EEB) of the University of Minnesota 2009, President's Award from the American Society of Naturalists, for 2002-2003, Guggenheim Fellowship for Natural Sciences, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation