Georgina Mace was among those attracted to John Maynard Smith's pioneering work in evolutionary ecology at the University of Sussex in the 1970s. As one of the first generation of conservation biologists, Mace has not only contributed to the scientific development of the field, but actively translated science into effective policy.

Mace's PhD thesis focused on the evolutionary ecology of small mammals, one of the first studies using comparative methods to test ecological and evolutionary hypotheses. She then went to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC to gain more qualitative insights from John Eisenberg, a mammalian expert at the US National Zoological Park. While there, Mace managed the effects of inbreeding in zoo populations, a task well suited to her background in evolutionary theory.

Mace moved to the University of Newcastle upon Tyne as a research fellow in comparative biology, but soon decided to work with zoo populations again. In the 1980s, she and her colleagues helped further the field by developing theories related to population viability, an area for which zoo populations were an important case study. “It was exciting to make quantitative scientific contributions to conservation,” she says.

Mace continued her work at the boundary of pure and applied science, as scientific adviser and conservation coordinator of the Federation of Zoological Gardens and at the Institute of Zoology in London. There, she helped to revise the rules for the World Conservation Union's list of threatened species. In 2000 she became science director of the institute, and reorganized the disciplinary groups into thematic areas — such as wildlife epidemiology — where breakthroughs in conservation biology were taking place.

On 1 November, she became director of the Natural Environment Research Council's Centre for Population Biology at Imperial College London. Evolutionary theorist Paul Harvey, who is currently secretary of the board of the Zoological Society of London, says that Mace's professional credentials and ability to influence policy will be major assets as she takes on her first major challenge. She will be faced with creating a strategic research plan to ensure the centre's government funding and to align its priorities with national and international science needs.

Mace also plans to use Imperial's focus on environmental issues such as climate change to promote cross-disciplinary work involving biodiversity and population biology.