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Born on November 18, 1965 in Munich. Studied zoology at the LMU in Munich (1985-1991). Doctorate at the University of Bielefeld. Postdoctoral positions at the University of Washington, Seattle (1995 -1998) and at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama (1996-1998). Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (1998-2000) and at Princeton (2000-2005), then lifetime professorship at Princeton (since 2005). Since 2008 Max Planck Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, and Professor of Ornithology at the University of Konstanz. Founded the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Biology in Constance/Radolfzell in 2019. Wikelski researches global animal migrations with the goal of combining the intelligent sensor network of animals into the ‘Internet of Animals’ and protecting animals worldwide.
Professor Wikelski was the 1998 Niko Tinbergen Award winner of the German Ethological Society, and the 2000 Bartolomew Award winner of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology of the USA. In 2008 he received an Emerging Explorer award from National Geographic, and in 2010 he received an Adventurer of the Year award for his significant contribution to the global study of animal migrations. Since 2014, Wikelski has been a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. In 2016, he received the Max Planck Research Award and became a Fellow of the National Geographic Society in 2017.
Foto: ©Mark Thiessen, National Geographic Society