Scott V. Edwards, Ph.D.

Dr. Scott V. Edwards is an evolutionary biologist, ornithologist, and comparative genomicist whose research spans avian evolutionary history, disease ecology, population genetics, and the genetic foundations of bird diversity. He is the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Curator of Ornithology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, where he has been a faculty member since 2003. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Edwards has served as President of three international scientific societies — the Society for the Study of Evolution, the Society of Systematic Biologists, and the American Genetic Association — and on advisory boards for the National Geographic Committee for Research and Exploration, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. From 2013 to 2015, he served as Division Director of the Division of Biological Infrastructure at the U.S. National Science Foundation, overseeing a staff of 22 and an annual research budget of $120 million.

His research addresses diverse aspects of avian biology, from evolutionary history and biogeography to disease ecology and comparative genomics. He has conducted fieldwork in phylogeography in Australia since 1987 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in immunogenetics at the University of Florida. His more recent work uses comparative genomics to study macroevolutionary patterns in birds, including the origin of feathers and the evolution of flightlessness. Dr. Edwards earned his doctorate in zoology from the University of California, Berkeley.