The laboratory's history dates back to 1989, when, on the initiative of Academician V.E. Sokolov, director of the Institute of Ecology and Evolution RAS, Professor Svetlana Aleksandrovna Shilova organized the Tropical Population Ecology Group. In 1992 it was renamed the Population Ecology Group, and in 2006 it was granted laboratory status. S.A. Shilova — known to her staff as "the Chief" — gathered several of her own students in the laboratory and also brought in other zoologists with diverse interests in population, behavioral, and physiological ecology, and community ecology. The diversity of the staff's scientific interests shaped a corresponding diversity of research directions and study subjects (primarily small mammals and birds) and their broad geography.
In 2009, Andrei Tchabovsky became head of the laboratory. The established research directions continue to develop and evolve, reaching new methodological and theoretical levels and opening up new topics for us, such as: the trade-off between immunity and reproduction, pace of life and personality in animals, karyotypic variability, meiotic mechanisms and reproductive isolation, non-stationary population and community dynamics, movement physiology and ecology, colonization of new areas, and others. In our work we combine long-term (decades-long) studies of natural populations, including individually based studies, with field and laboratory experiments and instrumental methods.