Evolutionary Biology

Editor in Chief

Noah Whiteman is an evolutionary biologist at the University of California-Berkeley, where he is Professor of Integrative Biology and Molecular and Cell Biology. He holds affiliations at Berkeley with the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, Center for Computational Biology, Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, Jepson and University Herbaria, and Essig Museum of Entomology. He has received awards and honors for his research contributions, including the Harvard University Distinction in Teaching Award and has been elected to the Royal Entomological Society, California Academy of Sciences, and Board of Directors of the Genetics Society of America. In 2020, Whiteman received a Guggenheim Fellowship to write Most Delicious Poison, his first book. He was raised in northeastern Minnesota, first in Duluth, and then at the edge of the vast Sax-Zim Bog wilderness, a relic of the last ice age. Trained as a botanist, entomologist, ornithologist, evolutionist, and geneticist, he began his scientific career in the Galápagos Islands where he studied the evolution of its famous birds and their parasites. His research laboratory at Berkeley now unravels the adaptations that drive plant-animal interactions. Whiteman’s pathbreaking research has been published widely in the scientific literature and featured by NPR, PBS, The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Scientific American, Popular Science, The Scientist. Since 2015, Whiteman has been recognized as an Outstanding Investigator by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and is devoted to helping create a more diverse, equitable, and just scientific research enterprise. He lives in Oakland, California with his husband.