Gregory Donald Edgecombe is a merit researcher in the department of Earth Sciences at the

Natural History Museum, London The Natural History Museum in London is a museum that exhibits a vast range of specimens from various segments of natural history. It is one of three major museums on Exhibition Road in South Kensington, the others being the Science Museum ...

. He is a leading figure in understanding the evolution of

arthropod Arthropods (, (gen. ποδός)) are invertebrate animals with an exoskeleton, a Segmentation (biology), segmented body, and paired jointed appendages. Arthropods form the phylum Arthropoda. They are distinguished by their jointed limbs and Arth ...

s, their position in

animal evolution Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation ...

and the integration of fossil data into analyses of animal phylogeny. As a palaeontologist, he is also an authority on the systematics of centipedes – and a

morphologist Morphology is a branch of biology dealing with the study of the form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features. This includes aspects of the outward appearance (shape, structure, colour, pattern, size), i.e. external mor ...

whose work contributes to the growth and methods of analysis of molecular datasets for inferring evolutionary relationships.

Education

Edgecombe was educated at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manha ...

where he received a

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...

in 1991 for systematic studies on the trilobite order Phacopida supervised by Niles Eldredge at the American Museum of Natural History.

Career and research

After his PhD, Edgecombe was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Alberta, and worked as a researcher at the Australian Museum in Sydney for 14 years. In 2007 he took up the position of research leader at the

, where since 2013 he has been a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) merit researcher. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: With Gonzalo Giribet, he co-authored a textbook, ''The Invertebrate Tree of Life'', published by Princeton University Press in March 2020.

Awards and honours

Edgecombe was awarded the president's medal by the Palaeontological Association in 2011 and the Fenner Medal for distinguished research in biology by the

Australian Academy of Science The Australian Academy of Science was founded in 1954 by a group of distinguished Australians, including Australian Fellows of the Royal Society of London. The first president was Sir Mark Oliphant. The academy is modelled after the Royal So ...

in 2004. He was elected a

Fellow of the Royal Society Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the judges of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematic ...

(FRS) in 2018.

References

Living people Fellows of the Royal Society Year of birth missing (living people) Columbia University alumni Paleontologists Employees of the Natural History Museum, London Place of birth missing (living people) {{paleontologist-stub