Genetics Society Medal 2025 Prof Josephine Pemberton

The Genetics Society is delighted to announce Prof Josephine Pemberton, the University of Edinburgh, as the winner of the 2025 Genetics Society Medal.

Josephine Pemberton was fascinated by biology from an early age, which led her to read Zoology at Oxford. A PhD on fallow deer at Reading University morphed from a behavioural to a genetic study, introducing her to protein electrophoresis and entirely changing her scientific course.

As a postdoc based at University College London and then the Cambridge Genetics Department, she joined the red deer project on the Ise of Rum and the Soay sheep project on St Kilda, both then led by Tim Clutton-Brock in Cambridge. These are long term studies in which individuals are monitored from birth, through all breeding attempts, to death, enabling many kinds of questions to be answered across behaviour, ecology and life history evolution. Josephine’s ambition was to use genetic tools to determine the paternity of newborn individuals in order to measure reproductive success accurately. In succession, she deployed DNA fingerprinting (Alec Jeffreys-style), microsatellites and ultimately SNPs. Combining genotypes with parentage inference software, some of it developed in her group, has led to large pedigrees for both study populations.

In 1994 Josephine moved to Edinburgh to take up a lectureship. She cannot say precisely when her interest in quantitative genetics started, but no question Edinburgh was the place to be. The statistical methods developed for improving dairy cow milk yield by the likes of Bill Hill are equally applicable to wild animal populations with pedigrees and the red deer and Soay sheep projects have yielded key papers on inheritance, selection and response to selection (or, intriguingly lack of it) in quantitative traits in the wild. Now, in the genomics era, Josephine’s archive of samples is being used to dissect trait variance in even greater detail. Once in Edinburgh, Josephine and colleagues gradually took over running the two field projects which continue to this day despite the vagaries of short-term funding.

Josephine was elected to elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2008, awarded the Molecular Ecology Prize in 2010, elected to the European Molecular Biology Organisation in 2014 and the Royal Society (London) in 2017, and was awarded the Darwin-Wallace medal of the Linnean Society in 2018.