Jennifer Fewell is a President’s Professor and Associate Dean of Faculty in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. Her research centers around the organization and evolution of insect societies. She is interested in the questions of how the organization of work emerges within social groups, and how this division of labor scales up with group size. She also studies the intertwined roles of social interactions and selection in shaping social cooperation.
In current work, she examines the role that self-organization plays in the transition from solitary to group living, and again as groups scale up in size. She primarily works on harvester ants, but she has studied the social organization of a range of other cooperative groups, from sweat bees to NBA basketball teams. She received her PhD in 1988 from the University of Colorado, Boulder.