Nick Barton

Nicholas Hamilton Barton FRS FRSE (born 30 August 1955) is a British evolutionary biologist.[3][4][5][6][7][8]

Nicholas Barton
Born	Nicholas Hamilton Barton 30 August 1955
Citizenship	British
Alma mater	University of Cambridge (BA) University of East Anglia (PhD)
Known for	Evolution textbook[1]
Awards	Bicentenary Medal of the Linnean Society (1985) FRS (1994) Darwin Medal (2006) Darwin–Wallace Medal (2008) Erwin Schrödinger Prize (2013)
Scientific career
Fields	Evolutionary biology
Institutions	University College London University of Edinburgh Institute of Science and Technology Austria
Thesis	A narrow hybrid zone in the alpine grasshopper podisma pedestris (1979)
Doctoral advisor	Godfrey Hewitt[2]

Education

Barton was educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge where he graduated with a first-class degree in Natural Sciences in 1976 and gained his PhD supervised by Godfrey Hewitt at the University of East Anglia in 1979.[2]

Career

After a brief spell as a lab demonstrator at the University of Cambridge, Barton became a Lecturer at the Department of Genetics and Biometry, University College London, in 1982. Professor Barton is best known for his work on hybrid zones, often using the toad Bombina bombina as a study organism, and for extending the mathematical machinery needed to investigate multilocus genetics, a field in which he worked in collaboration with Michael Turelli. Concrete research questions he has investigated include: the role of epistasis, the evolution of sex, speciation, and the limits on the rate of adaptation.

Barton moved to the University of Edinburgh in 1990, where he is said to have been instrumental in attracting to the university Brian and Deborah Charlesworth, with whom he had previously collaborated, thus complementing the university's strong tradition in quantitative genetics with a population genetics side and making the University of Edinburgh one of the foremost research institutions of genetics in the world. In 2008 Barton moved to Klosterneuburg (Austria) where he became the first professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria.

Barton was made a professor in 1994. In 2007, Barton, along with Derek E.G. Briggs, Jonathan A. Eisen, David B. Goldstein, and Nipam H. Patel, collaborated to create Evolution,[1] an undergraduate textbook which integrates molecular biology, genomics, and human genetics with traditional evolutionary studies.

Awards and honours

• 2013 Erwin Schrödinger Prize
• 2013 Mendel Medal, Leopoldina
• 2009 Darwin–Wallace Medal
• 2006 Darwin Medal
• 1998 President's Award (joint with Mark Kirkpatrick), American Society of Naturalists
• 1995 Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
• 1994 Fellow of the Royal Society
• 1994 David Starr Jordan Prize (joint with S. Pacala)
• 1992 Scientific Medal, Zoological Society
• 1985 Bicentenary Medal of the Linnean Society

References

1. Nicholas H. Barton, Derek E. G. Briggs, Jonathan A. Eisen, David B. Goldstein, Nipam H. Patel "Evolution" Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press; 1st edition (30 June 2007) ISBN 0-87969-684-2
2. "Curriculum Vitae – Nicholas Hamilton Barton" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 31 December 2016. Retrieved 8 October 2016.
3. Barton, N. H.; Etheridge, A. M. (2004). "The effect of selection on genealogies". Genetics. 166 (2): 1115–31. doi:10.1534/genetics.166.2.1115. PMC 1470728. PMID 15020491.
4. Prof. Barton's staff homepage at the University of Edinburgh
5. List of publications
6. Nick Barton's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
7. Barton, N. H.; Hewitt, G. M. (1989). "Adaptation, speciation and hybrid zones". Nature. 341 (6242): 497–503. Bibcode:1989Natur.341..497B. doi:10.1038/341497a0. PMID 2677747. S2CID 4360057.
8. Barton, N. H. (2001). "The role of hybridization in evolution". Molecular Ecology. 10 (3): 551–68. doi:10.1046/j.1365-294x.2001.01216.x. PMID 11298968. S2CID 22129817.