Harvard Club of Oregon and Southwest Washington

Born in London, Andrew Berry has a degree in zoology from Oxford University and a PhD in evolutionary genetics from Princeton University. He was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and is still at Harvard where he is currently Lecturer on Organismic & Evolutionary Biology. Combining the techniques of field biology with those of molecular biology, his work has been a search for evidence at the DNA level of Darwinian natural selection. He has published on topics as diverse as Giant Rats in New Guinea, mice on Atlantic islands, aphids from the Far East, and the fruit fly. At Harvard, he currently teaches courses on evolutionary biology, on genetics (with Pardis Sabeti and Hopi Hoekstra), on the development of evolutionary thinking (with Janet Browne), and on the physical basis of biological systems (with Logan McCarty). He also teaches a Harvard study abroad summer program based at Queen’s College, Oxford, that combines history of science with a review of current thought in evolutionary biology. He has additionally taught courses in less predictable venues, like Sabanci University, Istanbul, and the University of Antananarivo, Madagascar. He has given lectures on evolutionary topics to popular audiences all over the world – everywhere from Ankara to the Antarctic. His non-technical writing has appeared in, among others, Slate, The Independent, and the London Review of Books. He is the editor of a collection of the writings of Alfred Russel Wallace, the Victorian biologist who, with Charles Darwin, co-discovered natural selection (Infinite Tropics, Verso 2002), and of the Penguin Classics Edition of Wallace’s account of his travels in S E Asia, The Malay Archipelago.  He is the author, with James D. Watson, of an account of the history and impact of modern genetics published to mark the 50th anniversary of Watson & Crick's discovery of the double helix (DNA, Knopf 2003). As an educator and popularizer, his mission is to demystify the most important and most misinterpreted of all biological ideas, evolution.