The Mathematical, Computational and Modeling Science Center is named for Simon A. Levin, who was the dissertation advisor of the founding director. Levin received his BA from Johns Hopkins University and his PhD in Mathematics from the University of Maryland at College Park. While at Cornell University, he was Chair of the Section of Ecology and Systematics, and then Director of the Ecosystems Research Center, the Center for Environmental Research, and the Program on Theoretical and Computational Biology, as well as Charles A. Alexander Professor of Biological Sciences. Levin is currently the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. His research interests include understanding how macroscopic patterns and processes are maintained at the level of ecosystems and the biosphere through ecological and evolutionary mechanisms that operate primarily at the level of organisms. Other research areas include infectious diseases and the interface between basic and applied ecology.
Levin is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and a Foreign Member of the Istituto Veneto and the Istituto Lombardo. He is a University Fellow of Resources for the Future, a Fellow of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics, and a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. Among many other contributions to the field, Levin is a former President of the Ecological Society of America and the Society for Mathematical Biology, and a past Chair of the Board of the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics. He won the MacArthur Award, Distinguished Service Citation, the Eminent Ecologist Award of the Ecological Society of America, the Okubo Award of the Society for Mathematical Biology and the Japanese Society for Theoretical Biology, and the Distinguished Scientist Award of the American Institute for Biological Sciences. He was honored with the Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences by the Inamori Foundation, and the Margalef Prize of the Government of Catalonia, the Luca Pacioli Prize from Ca’Foscari University of Venice, Italy, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, and most recently, the National Medal of Science. Levin has mentored more than 100 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and has published widely.