Alan Grafen FRS is a Scottish ethologist and evolutionary biologist.
He currently teaches and undertakes research at St John's College, Oxford.
[1] Along with regular contributions to scientific journals, Grafen is known publicly for his work as co-editor (with Mark Ridley) of the 2006 festschrift Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think,[2] honouring the achievements of his colleague and former academic advisor.
He has worked extensively in the field of biological game theory, and, in 1990, devised a model showing that Zahavi's well-known handicap principle could theoretically exist in natural populations.
[3][4] He also published a seminal paper in the field of phylogenetic comparative methods, in which he demonstrated how the tools of generalized least squares could be applied to perform phylogenetically informed statistical analyses.