Rudolf Albert Raff (November 10, 1941 – January 5, 2019) was an American

biologist A biologist is a scientist who conducts research in biology. Biologists are interested in studying life on Earth, whether it is an individual cell, a multicellular organism, or a community of interacting populations. They usually speciali ...

, and James H. Rudy Professor of Biology at

Indiana University Indiana University (IU) is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana. Campuses Indiana University has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration of IUPUI. * Indiana Univers ...

. He was known for research in, and promotion of,

evolutionary developmental biology Evolutionary developmental biology (informally, evo-devo) is a field of biological research that compares the developmental processes of different organisms to infer how developmental processes evolved. The field grew from 19th-century beginn ...

. He was also director of the Indiana Molecular Biology Institute. __NOTOC__

Life

Raff was born in Shawnigan, Quebec in 1941 to a family of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. He graduated from

Pennsylvania State University The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State or PSU) is a public state-related land-grant research university with campuses and facilities throughout Pennsylvania. Founded in 1855 as the Farmers' High School of Pennsylvania, Penn State becam ...

with a B.S. in 1963, and from Duke University with a Ph.D. in 1967. He died in 2019 in Bloomington Hospital, Indiana, at the age of 77.

Awards

Raff was a 1987

Guggenheim Fellow Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

. He won the 2004

Sewall Wright Award The Sewall Wright Award is given annually by the American Society of Naturalists to a "senior-level" and active investigator making fundamental contributions the conceptual unification of the biological sciences. The award was established in 1991 a ...

, and won the

A.O. Kovalevsky Medal The A.O. Kovalevsky Medal, awarded annually by the St. Petersburg Society of Naturalists for extraordinary achievements in evolutionary developmental biology and comparative zoology, is named after the noted Russian embryologist Alexander Kovalevs ...

in 2001. He was a Fellow of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsi ...

Works

*with Thomas C. Kaufman, Illustrated by E.C. Raff, ''Embryos, Genes, and Evolution: The Developmental-Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change'', Macmillan 1983, *''The shape of life: genes, development, and the evolution of animal form,'' University of Chicago Press, 1996, *William R. Jeffery, Rudolf A. Raff (eds), ''Time, space, and pattern in embryonic development'', A.R. Liss, 1983, *Rudolf A. Raff, ''Once We All Had Gills, Growing Up Evolutionist in an Evolving World'', Indiana University Press 2012,

References

External links

*http://www.americanscientist.org/authors/detail/rudolf-raff {{DEFAULTSORT:Raff, Rudolf 1941 births 2019 deaths People from Shawinigan 21st-century American biologists Canadian biologists Indiana University faculty Pennsylvania State University alumni Duke University alumni Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Jewish scientists