BIO
Paul Brakefield is Professor of Zoology and Emeritus Director of the Museum of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, where he is also an Emeritus Fellow of Trinity College. From 2010 to 2019 he served as Director of the Museum of Zoology in Cambridge. An evolutionary biologist, he has researched extensively into the eyespot distribution on the wings of Bicyclus anynana, an African butterfly which he has used to study the genes that regulate specific developmental mechanisms, how the way in which development builds morphologies can contribute to shaping evolutionary trajectories, and, given the species’ striking phenotypic plasticity, the roles of metabolic, physiological, and morphological traits in ecological adaptation. He is a former president of the Linnean Society of London and the European Society of Evolutionary Biology, a Fellow of the Royal Society and an elected member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation, among other distinctions.
