Ben Sheldon is a biologist who works at the interface of behaviour, ecology and evolution, using birds as the model system. He uses long-term population studies to understand the causes and consequences of individual variation, mechanisms underlying responses to climate change, and the role of social interactions in population processes. Since 2002 he has directed the long-term population study of Great Tits in Wytham Woods, just outside Oxford, where his work increasingly focusses on interactions between trophic levels, their spatial scaling, and their interaction with climate change.

He obtained his PhD at the University of Sheffield, held a succession of postdoctoral fellowships at Uppsala University and Edinburgh University, before moving to Oxford as a Royal Society University Research Fellow. He was elected as the inaugural holder of the Luc Hoffmann Chair in Field Ornithology in 2004, and is Director of the Edward Grey Institute in the Department of Biology.

He has been awarded the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society, the E O Wilson award of the American Society of Naturalists and the Linnean Medal.