Thomas Dyer Seeley


Thomas Dyer Seeley is the Horace White Professor in Biology in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University. He is the author of several books on honeybee behavior, including Honeybee Democracy and The Wisdom of the Hive He was the recipient of the Humboldt Prize in Biology in 2001. He primarily studies swarm intelligence by investigating how bees collectively make decisions.

Background

Seeley was born on June 17, 1952. He went to elementary, middle and high schools in Ithaca, NY. He married Robin Hadlock Seeley and the couple had two children.

Education

Seeley earned his A.B. in Chemistry from Dartmouth College in 1974 and, four years later, his Ph.D. in Biology from Harvard University. His Ph.D. advisors were Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson.

Appointments

Seeley held the following academic appointments:
YearAppointment
1978-1980Junior Fellow, Society of Fellows, Harvard University
1980-1986Assistant and Associate Professor, Yale University
1986-1992Assistant and Associate Professor, Cornell University
1992–presentProfessor of Biology, Cornell University
1993-1994Visiting Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin
2001-2004Visiting Professor, University of Würzburg
2005-08, 13-14Chairman, Cornell University, Department of Neurobiology and Behavior
2013-Horace White Professor in Biology, Cornell University

Honors and awards

In 1966 Seeley was an Eagle Scout. In 1974 he received the Hartshorne Chemistry Medal from Dartmouth College. Four years later he was elected a Junior Fellow at Harvard’s Society of Fellows and in 1983 he was awarded the Morse Prize Fellowship from Yale University. For a year from 1992, he was a Guggenheim Fellow and then the next year got a Fellowship from Berlin’s Institute for Advanced Study. In 1994 he received the Hambleton Award from the Eastern Apicultural Society.
In 1998 he received the Gold Medal for the Best Science Book,. Seeley received the Alexander von Humboldt’s Senior Scientist Prize in 2001 and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that same year. In 2008 he was an elected fellow for the Animal Behavior Society and in 2013 he gave the keynote address at the 33rd International Apimondia Congress in Kiev. In 2017 he was awarded fellowship to American Association for the Advancement of Science.
A species of bee, Neocorynurella seeleyi, was named after him in 1997. Seeley was awarded the Golden Goose Award in 2016 for his work on The Honeybee Algorithm.

Publications

Seeley has authored 5 books, at least 1 newspaper article, and over 175 scholarly publications.

Books