Gregory Edgecombe

He is a leading figure in understanding the evolution of arthropods, their position in animal evolution 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 whose work contributes to the growth and methods of analysis of molecular datasets for inferring evolutionary relationships.

Greg Edgecombe FRS
Gregory Edgecombe at the Royal Society admissions day in London, July 2018
Born	Gregory Donald Edgecombe
Alma mater	Acadia University (BSc) University of Alberta (MSc) Columbia University (PhD)
Awards	Fenner Medal (2004)
Scientific career
Fields	Systematics Arthropods Evolution Palaeontology Chilopoda
Institutions	University of Alberta Australian Museum Natural History Museum, London
Thesis	Systematic studies on the trilobite order Phacopida (1991)
Doctoral advisor	Niles Eldredge
Website	www.nhm.ac.uk/our-science/departments-and-staff/staff-directory/greg-edgecombe.html

Edgecombe was educated at Columbia University where he received a PhD in 1991 for systematic studies on the trilobite order Phacopida supervised by Niles Eldredge at the American Museum of Natural History.

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 Natural History Museum, London, where since 2013 he has been a Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) merit researcher. 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 in 2004. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2018.