2024 Scott V. Edwards

Dr. Scott Edwards is Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Curator of Ornithology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. Scott is an evolutionary biologist, with diverse interests in molecular evolution, phylogenetics, comparative genomics, disease resistance and population genetics. His research uses birds as model systems: he focuses on their evolutionary history and genome evolution, and has conducted fieldwork to study diverse species across the globe. He did postdoctoral work at the University of Florida to study interactions of birds and infectious diseases and has helped develop statistical models uniting population genetics and phylogenetics. His current work focuses on using phylogenetic trees and statistical models to link genome variation, especially noncoding DNA, and phenotypic variation. He is also building pangenomes of bird populations to understand the evolutionary genetics of structural variation.

Scott has served as President of the Society for the Study of Evolution, the Society of Systematic Biologists, and the American Genetic Association, as well as on the Advisory Boards of the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian) and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. From 2013-2015 Scott served as Division Director of the Division of Biological Infrastructure at the US National Science Foundation, where he facilitated funding in areas such as undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral research experiences, supporting biological collections and major infrastructure and bioinformatics. He is an Elected Fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (2009), the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2009), the US National Academy of Sciences (2015) and the American Philosophical Society (2020). He has a long-standing interest in increasing the diversity of undergraduates, graduate students and faculty in evolutionary biology and biodiversity science. In 2020, he along with Rich Kliman shared the inaugural Inclusiveness, Diversity, Equity and Access (IDEA) Award from the Society for the Study of Evolution.