Scott V. Edwards
Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology,
Curator of Ornithology,
Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology
in the Museum of Comparative Zoology
Phone: 617-384-8082
E-mail:
Office: 306 MCZ , 26 Oxford St
Lab Website: http://www.oeb.harvard.edu/faculty/edwards/index.html
We study the evolutionary biology of birds and relatives, combining field, museum and genomics approaches to understand the basis of avian diversity, evolution and behavior. Our guiding approaches include population genetics, which provides a quantitative framework for studying speciation, geographic variation and genome evolution; systematics, which acknowledges that the focal species of any study has relatives that are behaviorally and ecologically no less interesting; and natural history, which gives meaning to the genes and genomic patterns we study.
Recent Publications
Brumfield, R. T., and S. V. Edwards. 2007. Evolution into and out of the Andes: a Bayesian analysis of historical diversification in Thamnophilus antshrikes. Evolution 61:346-367.
Organ, C., A. Shedlock, A. Meade, M. Pagel, and S. V. Edwards. 2007. Origin of avian genome size and structure in non-avian dinosaurs. Nature 446: 180-184.
Edwards, S. V., L. Liu, D. K. Pearl. 2007. High-resolution species trees without concatenation. PNAS 104: 2767-2772
Shedlock, A. M., C. W. Botka, S. Zhao, J. Shetty, T. Zhang, J. S. Liu, P. J. Deschavanne and S. V. Edwards. 2007. Phylogenomics of non-avian reptiles and the structure of the ancestral amniote genome. PNAS 104: 2767-2772.
Wang, Z., K. Farmer, G. E. Hill, and S. V. Edwards. 2006. A cDNA macroarray approach to parasite-induced gene expression changes in a songbird host: genetic response of house finches to experimental infection by Mycoplasma gallisepticum. Molecular Ecology 15:1263-1273
Jennings , W. B. and Edwards, S. V. 2005. Speciational history of Australian grass finches (Poephila) inferred from 30 gene trees. Evolution 59:2033-2047.
See complete publications list. 
Courses Taught
OEB 125. Molecular Ecology and Evolution
OEB 190. Biology and Diversity of Birds
OEB 275r. Frontiers of Evolutionary Biology (course head)
