Quick Facts
Biography
Lincoln Pierson Brower (born 1931) is an entomologist and ecologist, known for his work on monarch butterflies through six decades, including on their automimicry and conservation. G. Pasteur called this Browerian mimicry, after Lincoln and his wife Jane Van Zandt Brower.
Life
Brower was born in New Jersey in 1931. At high school he met Jane Van Zandt. He was educated at Princeton University where he gained a BA in biology in 1953. He and Jane married and took their PhDs in zoology together at Yale University in 1957, his on speciation in the Papilio glaucus group of butterflies, hers doing the first ever controlled experiment on Batesian mimicry in butterflies. He spent two years at Oxford University, the first as a Fulbright scholar, in E. B. Ford's ecological genetics laboratory. He then lectured at Amherst College from 1958. In 1980 he became professor of zoology at the University of Florida. On retiring in 1997, he moved to Sweet Briar College as a research professor.
He began studying the monarch butterfly while a postgraduate at Yale in 1954, and became a world expert on the species over six decades. He has contributed to over 200 papers, combining research, public education about the monarch butterfly, and conservation work. He received the E. O. Wilson Award in 2016 for his work.