Andrew Berry
Quick Facts
Biography
Andrew Berry (born 1963) is a British evolutionary biologist and historian of science with a particular interest in Alfred Wallace. He was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and is currently a lecturer in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. His research combined field and laboratory methods to detect positive Darwinian selection (i.e. adaptive evolution) at the molecular level in natural populations. In addition to technical articles, he has published in the London Review of Books, Slate, and elsewhere. He has published two books: Infinite tropics: an Alfred Russel Wallace anthology, 2003, with a foreword written by Stephen Jay Gould, and DNA: The Secret of Life with James D. Watson, 2003. In addition to lecturing at Harvard, he also leads a Harvard Summer Study Abroad program at Queen's College, Oxford on the history of evolutionary biology and on current ideas in the field. He teaches evolutionary biology regularly at Sabancı University in Istanbul, Turkey, and is accordingly targeted by Turkish creationist organizations.
Berry has worked on the script development for several major TV shows: Race, the Power of an Illusion in 2003 by PBS, the 5-part Channel 4 DNA, and NOVA's Lord of the Ants. In 2013, along with George Beccaloni, curator with a special interest in Orthopteroidea and the Alfred Russel Wallace collections at the Natural History Museum, London, Berry narrated a short animated film for The New York Times to celebrate the Alfred Russel Wallace′s centenary.
Personal Background and Education
Andrew Berry was born in 1963 in London. His father is biologist R. J. Berry. He attended Shrewsbury School, has a degree in Zoology from St John's College, University of Oxford, and did his PhD under Martin Kreitman in evolutionary genetics at Princeton University. At Harvard, he did post-doctoral work in Richard Lewontin's lab.
He is married to Harvard Professor Naomi Pierce, and they have twin daughters named Megan and Katie.