Kevin Neville Lala (formerly Kevin Neville Laland; born 5 October 1962)^[1][2] is an English evolutionary biologist who is Professor of Behavioural and Evolutionary Biology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Educated at the University of Southampton and University College London,^[3] he was a Human Frontier Science Program fellow at the University of California, Berkeley before joining the University of St Andrews in 2002. He is one of the co-founders of niche construction theory^[4] and a prominent advocate of the extended evolutionary synthesis.^[5] He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Society of Biology. He has also received a European Research Council Advanced Grant,^[6] a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award,^[7] and a John Templeton Foundation grant.^[8] He was the president of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association from 2007 to 2010^[9] and a former president of the Cultural Evolution Society.^[10] Lala is currently an external faculty of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research.^[11]

The Lala Lab is primarily focused on animal social learning, innovation, and intelligence,^[12] as well as human evolution, particularly the evolution of cognition and culture.^[13] Their work lies at the interdisciplinary interface of evolutionary biology, animal behavior, ecology, and psychology.^[14]

Following John Odling-Smee's attempt in 1988 to formalize the process of niche construction as an evolutionary process,^[15] Odling-Smee, Lala, and Marcus W. Feldman developed a theoretical framework – Niche Construction Theory – that models niche construction as an evolutionary process reciprocally interacting with the process of natural selection.^[4][16] This theory has been applied widely across multiple fields, including ecology^[17][18] evolutionary developmental biology,^[19] and human and cultural evolution.^[20][21][22]

In the mid-2010s, Kevin Lala, Tobias Uller, and colleagues pushed for an extended evolutionary synthesis in a series of high-impact articles.^[23][24] From 2015 to 2018, Uller and Lala led a large international John Templeton Foundation grant to test key hypotheses and assumptions of the extended evolutionary synthesis.^[8][25]

Kevin Lala previously served on the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion division of the School of Biology as deputy director.^[26] He is currently serving as an anti-racism advocate,^[27] publishing articles^[28][29] on racism in academia.

Lala changed his name from Laland, stating on his lab website "Lala was my original family name, which my parents anglicized when I was 4, in an attempt to reduce the racism that their children experienced. I may have benefited from my surname being anglicized, but it did not sit right with me that I should still bear that name more than 50 years later. I wish to celebrate my ancestry not hide it. I am proud of my Parsi Indian heritage. I am not going to be intimidated by racists."^[30]