Max Gotts

About Max Gotts

Max Gotts’s family immigrated to the United States from the United Kingdom in pursuit of economic opportunity, first in 2010, and then again in 2013. Having lived half of his life in the UK and half in the US, Max has experienced two parallel worlds that share a common language but hold different perspectives on freedom, self, and ambition. He is inspired by his parents’ fight for prosperity and the pursuit of the “American Dream,” while remaining committed to the British outlook of how to support a functional society.

Max graduated from Princeton University in 2024 summa cum laude with an AB in ecology and evolutionary biology and minors in astrobiology and mathematics. He was a 2023 Udall Scholar, a 2020 Gold Presidential Service Awardee, and an associate member of Sigma Xi. His thesis on poison-dart frog acoustic evolution, advised by Stephen Pacala, was funded by the renowned Becky Colvin ’95 Memorial Research Fund and he received a poster award for the best senior thesis in evolution and behavior. 

Max has performed fieldwork on three continents focused on conservation, evolution, and behavior, working with leatherback sea turtles, Grevy’s zebras, African elephants, sponge brittle stars, strawberry poison-dart frogs, frog-biting midges, and the everlasting tebenna moth. Max also pioneered work with Fields medalist Charles Fefferman, creating a novel algorithm to convert field measurements of organisms’ traits into mathematical functions that describe their contemporary evolution.

Max is a PhD student at Cornell University in ecology and evolutionary biology, affiliated with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and is advised by Maren Vitousek. His research focuses on how climate change is causing rapid evolution in birds, such as the red-winged blackbird and violet-fronted brilliant. He utilizes big data and hierarchical Bayesian models to unravel complex biological systems, focusing on processes that occur on both ecological and evolutionary levels. Max is committed to making scientific research more equitable and reliable, and is teaching a course on speciation at a local high school as a Cornell GRASSHOPR Fellow.