Andrew P. "Pete" Vayda (December 7, 1931 – January 15, 2022) was a Hungarian-born American anthropologist and ecologist who was a distinguished professor emeritus of anthropology and ecology at Rutgers University. Biographical background Vayda was born in Budapest, Hungary, on December 7, 1931. He came to the United States in 1939 with his mother. He grew up in New York City. He attended Columbia University, obtaining his B.A. in 1952 and his Ph.D. in anthropology in 1956. His dissertation, based on library research he had done in New Zealand in 1954–1955, was a detailed description and analysis of Maori warfare. A distinguished professor of anthropology and ecology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, from 1972 until his retirement in 2002, he had also been a professor at Columbia University (1960–1972) and a lecturer at the University of British Columbia (1958–1960). Beginning in the 1960s and continuing into his retirement years, he taught also at various European, American, Australian, and Indonesian universities for periods of a year or less. Social and ecological field research was conducted and/or directed by Vayda in the coral atolls of the Northern Cook Islands in 1956–57, in Papua New Guinea during the 1960s, and in Indonesia at various times and on various islands since the 1970s until 2017. He founded the journal Human Ecology in 1972 and has been serving on the editorial boards of this and other journals through the years. Since 2002, he has been an independent scholar with a home base in New York City and also an adjunct professor at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and at the University of Indonesia in Depok, Indonesia, and a senior research associate of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in Bogor, Indonesia. A festschrift in his honor was published in 2008. In December 2021, Human Ecology published a tribute to Vayda in celebration of his 90th birthday. Vayda died on January 15, 2022, at the age of 90. A virtual obituary, with pictures from Vayda's various excursions and of him and his loved ones, was created in his honor. Contributions Vayda's long and varied career featured historical, anthropological, ecological, philosophical, and interdisciplinary research. He is known also for his criticisms of the work of others for failures of causal reasoning and explanation and for undue generalizing and theorizing in the absence of adequate supporting evidence. His published works include some hundred articles