Prof. Emeritus Dan Cohen was awarded a lifetime achievement award by the Israeli Society for Evolutionary Biology in the Society’s annual meeting last week. The award was in recognition of many years of contribution to theoretical studies in ecology, evolution and behavior, and for his contribution to the evolutionary community in Israel and worldwide. Dan Cohen has been trying for many years to use simple mathematical tools to explain decision making processes in various organisms and to explain why they act the way they do. One of his early influential studies was on the idea of “bet hedging”, according to which, when an organism doesn’t have enough information about future conditions, it chooses not to decide, and adopts a strategy that prepares it for several possible scenarios. For example, when a plant can’t predict how much rain there will be this season, it spreads some of its seeds now, but keeps some of them for the next season, in case there is not enough rain now.

In addition to his many studies on various theoretical questions Danny has also been inspirational for many scientists in the fields of evolution and ecology. Many of the leaders in these fields in Israel learned from him and talked with him extensively in the early stages of their career. He thus helped many Israeli scientists develop their ideas and contributed to their scientific development. Dan Cohen also served as chair of the Institute of Life Sciences in 1981-1983.