Pablo A. Marquet
He looks for the laws that govern ecosystems, in the same way physics looks for the ones that govern matter.
Physics has laws. Ecology, for a long time, mostly had cases: this forest, that species, this interaction. Macroecology is the opposite bet — that if life is viewed at a sufficiently large scale, quantitative regularities appear that are as robust as those of a physical law.
Marquet is one of the ecologists who has pushed that bet hardest, and in 2018 he was elected international member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.
Scaling laws
His best-known work deals with how a species' abundance scales within a community: why small-bodied species are numerous and large ones scarce, and why that relationship looks so similar across very different ecosystems. He has also studied the evolution of body size across continental land masses.
His own formulation of his research lines is explicitly theoretical: the principles underlying the structure and dynamics of ecological systems, and the emergence of social complexity —including the biological basis of human technological and ideological innovations—. He chairs the Instituto de Sistemas Complejos de Valparaíso and is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, the home of that kind of thinking.
Born in Santiago
Bachelor's degree in Biology
Universidad de Concepción.
Doctorate in Biology
University of New Mexico. Postdoctoral fellowship at the Universidad Católica.
Professor at the Universidad Católica
Today he heads its Departamento de Ecología.
Guggenheim Fellowship
In Ecology.
Academia Chilena de Ciencias
Corresponding member.
National Academy of Sciences
International member. That same year, first Chilean in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Comité Científico de Cambio Climático
Coordinates the Biodiversity working group of the committee created for COP25.
From model to decision
The other half of his work is deliberately practical: applying ecological knowledge and the analysis of available databases to support decision-making in conservation and sustainable management. He coordinated the Biodiversity working group of the Comité Científico Asesor de Cambio Climático created for Santiago's COP25, which delivered climate action recommendations across seven areas. He is also a member of the Earth Commission.
- Head of the Departamento de Ecología at the Facultad de Ciencias Biológicas, Universidad Católica.
- Researcher at the Instituto de Ecología y Biodiversidad (IEB).
- External professor at the Santa Fe Institute and chair of the Instituto de Sistemas Complejos de Valparaíso.
- Member of The World Academy of Sciences.
- Editor of "How Landscapes Change", "Scaling Biodiversity", "Las Rutas de la Complejidad" and "Innovation from cells to societies".
What the sources do not quite settle
He has NOT received the Premio Nacional de Ciencias Naturales.
This is verified explicitly because the candidate list this research began with attributed it to him. The 2024 Premio Nacional de Ciencias Naturales went to José Zagal Moya. Marquet does not appear on the list of laureates.
He has been an international member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States since 2018.
The academy's own profile.
Bachelor's degree from the Universidad de Concepción (1987) and doctorate from the University of New Mexico (1993).
This matches between the Instituto de Ecología y Biodiversidad and the NAS profile.
He was born in 1963 in Santiago.
Two independent sources agree on the year and the city. The day —2 August— appears only in Wikidata without a reference, so the entry records only the year.
The exact number of his publications.
One profile speaks of more than 190 and another of more than 240. This was not resolved.
- Instituto de Ecología y Biodiversidad. Ficha institucional con líneas de investigación
View source → - National Academy of Sciences (EE.UU.). Ficha de miembro internacional
View source → - Sociedad de Ecología de Chile. Reseña de sus pares sobre su obra
View source → - Ministerio del Medio Ambiente · COP25. El comité científico de cambio climático y sus recomendaciones
View source →
How to cite
This is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0, as long as you give credit.
FísicaEterna. (2026). Pablo A. Marquet — biography, FísicaEterna. Retrieved [access date] from https://www.fisicaeterna.cl/en/biographies/pablo-marquet
@misc{fisicaeterna_pablo_marquet,
author = {FísicaEterna},
title = {Pablo A. Marquet — biography, FísicaEterna},
year = {2026},
url = {https://www.fisicaeterna.cl/en/biographies/pablo-marquet},
note = {CC BY 4.0}
}