Scott V. Edwards
Scott V. Edwards is Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Curator of Ornithology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. His research focuses on diverse aspects of the biology of birds and related species, including evolutionary history and biogeography, disease ecology, population genetics, and comparative genomics. Dr. Edwards has helped develop novel methods for estimating phylogenetic trees (evolutionary diagrams) from multilocus DNA sequence data. His recent work uses comparative genomics in diverse contexts to study macroevolutionary patterns in birds, including the origin of feathers and the evolution of flightlessness.
From 2013 to 2015 Dr. Edwards served as Division Director of the Division of Biological Infrastructure at the U.S. National Science Foundation, overseeing funding programs focused on undergraduate research, postdoctoral fellowships, natural history collections and field stations, and cyber- and other infrastructure for all areas of biology. He served as President of the Society for the Study of Evolution, the Society of Systematic Biologists, and the American Genetic Association. He has served on the National Geographic’s Committee for Research and Exploration, the Senior Advisory Boards of the NSF-funded U.S. National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) and the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS), and on the Advisory Boards of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2009), a Fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (2009), and a member the National Academy of Sciences (2015).