Biography
Jonathan Losos received his AB from Harvard University, followed by a PhD in Zoology from the University of California, Berkeley, and postdoctoral studies at the University of California, Davis. He then taught at Washington University for 14 years, rising to the rank of professor and serving as the Director of the Tyson Research Center and the Environmental Studies Program. He then went to Harvard University for 12 years as a professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Curator in Herpetology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, before returning to Washington University in 2018. Losos studies biological diversity—how it originates, what forces maintain it—focusing on lizards as a model study system. His work has been conducted in the Caribbean islands, Central and South America, Australia, and South Africa. He has published two books, Lizards in an Evolutionary Tree: Ecology of Adaptive Radiation of Anoles (University of California Press, 2009) and Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution (Penguin-Random House, 2017). Professor Losos has served as Editor-in-Chief of The American Naturalist and President of the American Society of Naturalists. He is the recipient of the Theodosius Dobzhansky Prize, the David Starr Jordan Prize, The Edward O. Wilson Naturalist Award, the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal, and a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.