Genetics Society Medal 2019 – Prof Deborah Charlesworth

Deborah Charlesworth is a Senior Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. After a PhD in genetics at Cambridge in 1968, she did postdoctoral research in human genetics at the Universities of Cambridge and Chicago. She then started working on evolutionary genetics with Brian Charlesworth at the Universities of Liverpool and Sussex, and was appointed to a faculty position at the University of Chicago in 1998, moving to Edinburgh as a Research Professor in 1997, to work on the evolution of plant mating systems and plant sex chromosomes. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society. She was the president of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution in 2007, and of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology in 2001, and received the Molecular Ecology Prize in 2011. She currently works on the evolution of sex chromosomes in a fish, the guppy. She has published over 200 papers and co-authored three books (two with Brian Charlesworth).

Deborah will present her lecture at the Genetics Society centenary scientific meeting, “A Century of Genetics” in Edinburgh, 2019.