Scott Edwards
NOMIS Senior Fellow
Organization
Collegium Helveticum
About Scott Edwards
Scott Edwards is a NOMIS–Collegium Helveticum Senior Fellow and the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Curator of Ornithology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, US.
Edwards graduated with a BA from Harvard College in 1986, received his PhD in zoology from the University of California, Berkeley, US, in 1992, and conducted postdoctoral work at the University of Florida, Gainesville, US, from 1992 to 1994. He was a faculty member at the University of Washington, Seattle, US, from 1995 to 2003, and then returned to Harvard in 2003.
He served as president of several scientific societies and on National Geographic’s Committee for Research and Exploration as well as on the advisory board of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in the US. From 2013 to 2015, he was division director of the Division of Biological Infrastructure at the US National Science Foundation.
NOMIS–Collegium Helveticum Senior Fellowship period: September 10, 2026 – March 31, 2027
Research focus
Edwards is an evolutionary biologist with diverse interests in molecular evolution, phylogenetics, comparative genomics and population genetics. His research uses birds as model systems. His current work focuses on using phylogenetic trees and statistical models to link genomic and phenotypic variation. He is also using advanced sequencing and computational methods to understand a poorly known class of mutations in the genome called structural variants.
As a NOMIS Senior Fellow, Edwards is exploring the evolutionary dynamics of a relatively understudied type of genomic variant — structural variants (SVs) — in natural populations of animals. Beyond the small, single-letter changes in DNA that scientists usually study, larger genomic rearrangements — insertions, deletions and inversions — may play an underappreciated role in evolution. His project, titled Pangenomes and Structural Variants in Molecular Ecology, asks: Do these structural variants evolve differently than the mutations we know best, and can studying them reveal new insights into how wild populations adapt?
Awards and recognition
Edwards was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2015. He also has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2009 and the American Philosophical Society since 2020.
