George Frederick Oster (April 20, 1940 – April 15, 2018) was an American mathematical

biologist A biologist is a scientist who conducts research in biology. Biologists are interested in studying life on Earth, whether it is an individual Cell (biology), cell, a multicellular organism, or a Community (ecology), community of Biological inter ...

, and Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

. He made seminal contributions to several varied fields including chaos theory, population dynamics, membrane dynamics and molecular motors. He was a 1985 MacArthur Fellow.

Early career

He graduated from

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

, with a Ph.D., in Nuclear Engineering in 1967. He was appointed as an assistant professor in at UC Berkeley in 1970. In the early 1970s Oster collaborated with Aharon Katzir-Katchalsky on statistical mechanics. Oster's work with

E. O. Wilson Edward Osborne Wilson (June 10, 1929 – December 26, 2021) was an American biologist, naturalist, entomologist and writer. According to David Attenborough, Wilson was the world's leading expert in his specialty of myrmecology, the study of an ...

on populations dynamics of social animals, particularly ants, is considered pioneering work in evolution in social insects. Oster was one of the first theoretical biologists to understand that a complex interplay between mechanical and chemical forces was at the root of most biological phenomena.

Later career

He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004. Oster was a

Guggenheim Fellow Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the a ...

, and a member of the science board of the

Santa Fe Institute The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, inclu ...

Awards

*1975 Guggenheim Fellowship *1984 MacArthur Fellows Program *1992

Weldon Memorial Prize The Weldon Memorial Prize, also known as the Weldon Memorial Prize and Medal, is given yearly by the University of Oxford. The prize is to be awarded without regard to nationality or membership of any University to the person who, in the judgeme ...

*Winfree Prize for Mathematical Biology *Sackler International Prize in Biophysics

References

External links

"George Oster", ''Scientific Commons''
1940 births 2018 deaths Columbia School of Engineering and Applied Science alumni University of California, Berkeley faculty MacArthur Fellows Theoretical biologists Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Santa Fe Institute people American biologists {{US-biologist-stub