Professor Christopher Wills, Professor of Biological Sciences, University of California

Christopher Wills received his BA and MSc in Biology from the University of British Columbia in 1960 and 1962, and a PhD in Genetics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1965. He was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at Berkeley from 1965-66, an Assistant Professor of Biology at Wesleyan University in Connecticut from 1966 to 1972, and Associate and Full professor of Biology at UCSD from 1972 to the present. He held a Guggenheim Fellowship from 1977-78. He received the Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology from the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1999. His 1998 book Children of Prometheus: the Accelerating Pace of Human Evolution (Perseus Books) was a finalist for the 2000 Aventis Prize, the most important English prize for Science books . His research interests include the maintenance of genetic variability in human populations, the forces that maintain variation in complex ecosystems such as rainforests and coral reefs, the evolution of diseases, and the evolution of our species.