Alain Pavé is Emeritus Professor at University Claude Bernard, Lyon, France. He was also Research Director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), in charge of interdisciplinary research programs on the environment, and, in recent years, of the Amazon research program of the CNRS, as well as being in charge of the development of large-scale facilities in French Guiana. He is a biometrician, a specialist in the mathematical modeling of living systems. He has participated in the emergence and development of bioinformatics. Recently, his personal field of research has been devoted to theoretical ecology, and the theory of the dynamics of biodiversity. He has published around 140 scientific articles and books.