Dr. Maria Orive

Maria E. Orive served as Faculty Ombuds for the University of Kansas for 12 years, from 2007 through 2019. During that time, she met with hundreds of individual visitors to the KU Ombuds Office, as well as provided workshops, training and informational sessions on topics such as ethics and whistleblowing, academic civility, difficult conversations, and on the role of the Ombuds Office. 

She is a professor of evolutionary theory in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and currently serves as Associate Dean for Natural Sciences and Mathematics at the University of Kansas. Her research develops mathematical models that provide a conceptual framework for exploring important questions in evolutionary biology. She has focused on the role of reproductive strategy (e.g. asexual and clonal forms of reproduction, and sexual reproduction) in shaping the genetic diversity available for evolution to act on, and the relative strength of those evolutionary forces. Her work extends key concepts of population genetics and evolutionary theory, originally established for organisms with relatively simple life histories, to the types of complex life histories seen in many ecologically important organisms, such as reef-building corals and key plant species that include perennial grasses in prairies and savannahs.  

Dr. Orive teaches introductory genetics and biostatistics, as well as graduate courses in population genetics, sexual and asexual reproduction, and coalescent theory. She previously served as Associate Chair of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) Advisory Board and was elected President of the American Genetic Association (publishers of Journal of Heredity). Other past positions include acting as Associate Editor for The American Naturalist and as Chair of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. She serves currently on the Advisory Committee for the KU Center for Genomics, is an Associate Editor for the journal Evolution, and is an elected council member for the Society for the Study of Evolution. 

Dr. Orive received her BS with Honors from Stanford University, and her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. She was awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Minority Graduate Fellowship for her graduate studies and was an NSF-NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. During 2007-2008, she was the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Over the last 24 years, her research has been funded by numerous grants from NSF and from the National Institutes of Health.