Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior

Jae C. Choe is a Distinguished Professor of EcoScience at Ewha Womans University and the Founding President of National Institute of Ecology in Korea. After receiving his PhD from Harvard University in 1990, Jae was elected as Junior Fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows. He then returned to his home country, Korea, to work in the School of Biological Sciences at Seoul National University. In 2006, he moved to Ewha Womans University to take the post of University Chair Professor and Director of its Natural History Museum. He has served as the President of the Ecological Society of Korea and is currently serving as the Co-President of the Climate Change Center. Since his return to Korea, he has been conducting a long-term behavioral-ecological research of black-billed magpies while continuing to study social behavior of insects. About 10 years ago he began a long-term field study of Javan Gibbons in the Gunuung Halimun-Salak National Park of Indonesia. Quite recently, he embarked yet another field study of Indo-Pacific Bottlenose Dolphins near Jeju Island of Korea.

Jae's research is in the area of behavior, ecology, and evolution of social animals. Although he began his academic career by studying insects, he has over the years expanded his expertise into a wide range of animals including social spiders, fiddler crabs, tree frogs, freshwater gobies, magpies, wild ponies, dolphins, and primates. He has contributed as an editor to 5 scientific books. Among them, The Evolution of Social Behavior in Insects and Arachnids and The Evolution of Mating Systems in Insects and Arachnids. In addition, he has written popular science books, nearly 30 in Korean and 1 in English (Secret Lives of Ants, Johns Hopkins University Press 2012). Currently, he is serving on editorial boards for 6 international journals. For the first edition of Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior he was a Section Editor on Arthropod Social Behavior.