Sen Hon Prof Fellow: Brian Charlesworth
Brian Charlesworth has been made a Senior Honorary Professorial Fellow.
He works at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Edinburgh.
He obtained his PhD in Genetics at Cambridge University in 1969, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow with Richard Lewontin at the University of Chicago.
He subsequently worked at the universities of Liverpool, Sussex and Chicago, moving to Edinburgh as a Royal Society Research Professor in 1997.
Professor Charlesworth is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Royal Society of Edinburgh, and Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
His current research interests are in population genetics, molecular evolution and genome evolution, using mathematical and computer modeling of evolutionary processes, as well as experimental work on the fruitfly Drosophila.
This work deals with questions such as the evolutionary significance of sex and genetic recombination, and the extent of natural selection on DNA sequence variants in natural populations.
Professor Charlesworth has published more than 200 research papers and three books (two co-authored with Deborah Charlesworth, who is also an evolutionary biologist).