Scott V. Edwards
Ph.D. 1992 UC Berkeley
Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology,
Harvard University,
26 Oxford Street,
Cambridge, MA 02138
MCZ Labs Room 306
Tel: 617-384-8082
Fax: 617-495-5667
email: sedwards(at)fas.harvard.edu
Scott Edwards' interest in ornithology and natural history began as a
child growing up in Riverdale, Bronx, NYC, where he undertook his first
job in environmental science working for an environmental institute called
Wave Hill. He received
his undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1986. As an undergraduate, Scott
took a year off from his studies to learn what it is biologists do - he
spent 6 months volunteering at the Smithsonian's National
Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, then gained his first
field experience assisting with research on the natural history and conservation
of native birds in Hawaii and northern California. He returned to Harvard
to finish his degree, and enrolled in the PhD program in the (then) Zoology
Department (now Integrative
Biology) the University of California, Berkeley. During his first
year as a graduate student, he spent 10 months in New Guinea and Australia
first volunteering in research on ecology of birds-of-paradise and later
striking off on his own to embark on what would become his dissertation
project, a study combining of the genetics and population structure of
a group of cooperatively breeding songbirds called babblers (Pomatostomus)
found throughout Australia and New Guinea. He received his PhD in 1992.
Scott did postdoctoral research as an Alfred P. Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow
in Molecular Evolution at the University of Florida, Gainesville, working
under Wayne
Potts (now at University of Utah) and Ward
Wakeland (now at UT Southwestern Medical Center). There he switched
modes to study the evolution of genes involved with disease resistance
in wild birds. Such genes play an important role in many aspects of avian
biology, including parasite resistance, plumage color variation and mate
choice. In late 1994 he assumed an Assistant Professorship in the Department
of Zoology (now Biology)
at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he was also Curator
of Genetic Resources at the Burke
Museum . During his 9 years at the U. Washington, he continued his
studies of immunogenetics and population genetics of birds, funded by
several grants from the National
Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society's Committee
for Research & Exploration , and is proud to have published five
papers with undergraduates as first authors during that time. He has served
on the Editorial Boards of Journal
of Molecular Evolution , Evolution
, American Zoologist (now Integrative
and Comparative Biology ) and Systematic
Biology and is now on the Editorial boards of Molecular
Biology and Evolution and Conservation
Genetics and on the Council of the American
Genetic Association . He has served on several NSF panels and on the
National Geographic's Committee
for Research & Exploration since 2001. He also received NSF funds
for an ongoing program to enhance undergraduate diversity at the annual
meetings for the Society for the Study of Evolution and is actively engaged
in increasing student diversity in the environmental and evolutionary
sciences.
He moved to Harvard University in late 2003 as a Professor of Organismic
and Evolutionary Biology and Curator of Ornithology in the Museum
of Comparative Zoology , where he continues efforts to unite genomics
and natural history and involve students at all levels. His current major
interests include genome and sex chromosome evolution and phylogenetics
in amniotes using BAC library and other resources; speciation analysis
and historical demography using multilocus SNP loci; estimation of recombination
rates and linkage disequilibrium in natural populations; behavioral and
ecological consequences of MHC variation; and QTL mapping in passerine
birds.
Scott talks to ABC Radio National in Australia on Dec 29, 2005. Listen to the broadcast here.
Recent Publications:
Edwards, S. V. and Smith, M. 2004. Hitchhiking and recombination in birds: evidence from Mhc-linked and unlinked loci in red-winged blackbirds (Agelaius phoeniceus). Genetical Research 84: 175-192
Edwards, S. V., Jennings , W. B. and Shedlock, A. M. (2005). Phylogenetics of modern birds in the era of genomics. Proceeding of the Royal Society of London series B 272: 979-992.
Edwards, S. V. 2005. Gene and Genome Evolution. Chapter 19, in Evolution, by Douglas Futuyma. Sinauer Associates, Sunderland, MA.
Edwards, S. V., Kingan, S. B., Calkins, J. D., Balakrishnan, C. N., W. Bryan Jennings, Swanson, W. J. and Sorenson, M. D. (2005). Speciation in birds: genes, geography and sexual selection. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (USA ) 102: 6550-6557.
Jennings , W. B. and Edwards, S. V. 2005. Speciational history of Australian grass finches (Poephila) inferred from 30 gene trees. Evolution 59:2033-2047
Edwards, S. V., S. Birks, R. T. Brumfield, and R. Hanner. (2005). Avian Genetic Resources Collections: Archives of Evolutionary and Environmental History. Auk 122:979-984.
Walsh, H. E. and Edwards, S. V. (2005). Conservation genetics and Pacific fisheries bycatch: mitochondrial differentiation and population assignment in black-footed albatrosses ( Phoebastria nigripes ). Conservation Genetics 6:289-295.
Chapus, C., C. Dufraigne, S. Edwards, A. Giron, B. Fertil, and P. Deschavanne. 2005. Exploration of phylogenetic data using a global sequence analysis method. BMC Evolutionary Biology 5:63.
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. Mol Ecol 15:1263-1273.
Aguilar, A., S. V. Edwards, T. B. Smith, and R. K. Wayne. 2006. Patterns of variation in MHC class II beta loci of the little greenbul (Andropadus virens) with comments on MHC evolution in birds. Journal of Heredity 97:133-142.
Fleischer, R. C., J. J. Kirchman, J. P. Dumbacher, L. Bevier, C. Dove, N. C. Rotzel, S. V. Edwards, M. Lammertink, K. J. Miglia, W. S. Moore. 2006. Mid-Pleistocene divergence of Cuban and North American ivory-billed woodpeckers. Biology Letters . Published online 10.1098/rsbl.2006.0490.
Manuscritps in Press
Shedlock, A. M., Janes, D., Edwards, S. V. 2006. Amniote phylogenomics: Testing hypotheses with large-scale sequence data from reptiles. In press in Phylogenomics (W. Murphy, Ed.) Humana Press, Inc., Totowa, NJ.
Hess, C. M., Wang, Z., Edwards, S. V. 2006. Evolutionary genetics of House Finches, a recently colonized host of a bacterial pathogen. Genetica.
Wang, Z., T. Miyake, S. V. Edwards and C. T. Amemiya. 2006. Tuatara (Sphenodon) genomics: BAC library construction, sequence survey and application to the DMRT gene family. J. Heredity.