International Award Goes to UT Biologist for Climate Change Revelations
- Apr 25, 2025
Editor's Note: This story is part of a Texas Global series celebrating UT Austin faculty members whose work has received international honors or awards.
Professor Camille Parmesan, a University of Texas at Austin biologist, has won the 2025 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Climate Change and Environmental Sciences for pioneering studies into wild species and their territorial responses to climate change. Her groundbreaking discovery laid “the foundations of climate change ecology,” according to the award committee.
Parmesan is the latest UT scientist to win a Frontiers of Knowledge award since 2018, when immunologist James Allison of The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, took the prize in the biomedicine category.
In the mid-1990s, Parmesan showed that several butterfly species in the United States and Europe were moving northward and upward to escape rising temperatures. During the next three decades, her work further revealed that climate change affected thousands of plant and animal species worldwide both on land and in the oceans. Her findings establish that rising temperatures had left a “globally coherent fingerprint” on biodiversity.
An early participant in the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Parmesan’s research has provided vital input to the design of effective conservation strategies adopted by governments and agencies around the world. Furthermore, her findings pose major ramifications for global public health, due to expansion of tropical diseases like malaria or dengue transmitted by mosquitos, as well as for sectors such as agriculture and fisheries, which are impacted by migrations of terrestrial and marine species.
Camille Parmesan began her research career studying plant-insect interactions. She was nearing the end of her PhD course when she responded to a NASA grant call with an “extremely risky” proposal to study the impact of climate change on Edith’s checkerpoint butterfly (Euphydryas editha), known to be sensitive to climate variability. She traveled from Spain to Finland, collecting data that pointed a single conclusion: Two-thirds of the species studied were moving northward.
The breadth of data and inductive reasoning used to rule out all other effects and attribute the extinction patterns of Edith’s checkerspot butterfly exclusively to climate change were precisely the factors that convinced the research community that the impact of rising temperatures on wild species was real, and, in the process, brought into being the new field of climate change ecology.
To learn more, read the full story on the Frontiers of Knowledge Award site.
