Profile of Scott Edwards

Abstract

Looking through Scott Edwards’ curriculum vitae is like wandering the halls of the natural history collections he curates: an invitation to dive deeply into one area combined with permission to think broadly and zip enthusiastically from one exhibit to another. Zoologist and curator of ornithology of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, Edwards was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2015. Although Edwards primarily uses birds as models to study molecular evolution and biodiversity, he took a foray into amphibians in his Inaugural Article (1), analyzing the diminutive genome of the ornate burrowing frog. In the past, he has documented rapid genomic shifts in green anole lizards in response to winter storms in the southern United States and examined the genome sizes of organisms, ranging from bacteriophages to dinosaurs (2⇓–4). Scott Edwards on his 76-day, 3,848-mile trek across the United States during the summer of 2020. Image credit: Scott Edwards. Orioles (Icterus) in the ornithology collections of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. Image credit: Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University/Jeremiah Trimble. As a youth, Edwards became interested in birds when a neighbor in Riverdale, New York, invited him to go birdwatching in their Bronx neighborhood. Something about matching the species in the field with pictures in a book appealed to him. When he entered Harvard University in 1981, Edwards was not thinking about studying ornithology but was instead headed toward medical school. “My dad was a doctor,” he says. “It just seemed like, ‘Well, that’s what biologists do.’” While still an undergraduate, he took a year off to learn the kinds of work that field biologists do. Edwards volunteered in collections at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and participated in field work in Hawaii, where he was born and had …