People

Peter R. and B. Rosemary Grant biographies

Peter and Rosemary Grant have been studying Darwin’s finches on the Galápagos islands since 1973. Their fieldwork is designed to understand the causes of an adaptive radiation. It combines analyses of archipelago-wide patterns of evolution with detailed investigations of population-level processes on two islands, Genovesa and Daphne. Their work is a blend of ecology, behavior and genetics. They have collaborated with investigators to estimate phylogenetic relations among the species of finches and their relatives on the continent and in the Caribbean, and to identify the molecular mechanisms involved in the development of beaks that vary so conspicuously among the species. Their work has been published in two books. A third book, entitled “How and Why Species Multiply”, was published by Princeton University Press in 2008.

Rosemary was initially trained at the University of Edinburgh, received a PhD degree from Uppsala University, and is now a research scholar and lecturer with the rank of professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. Peter is the Class of 1977 Professor of Zoology in the same department, having trained at Cambridge University, UK, and the University of British Columbia, Canada. Before joining Princeton in 1986, he taught at McGill University, Canada, and the University of Michigan.

Two books will be available to be signed:

Jonathon Weiner’s The Beak of the Finches: A Story of Evolution in Our Time and winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction (about the Grants)

Peter and Rosemary Grant’s How and Why Species Multiply. The radiation of Darwin’s Finches. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey (2006).

Books may be purchased in advance and at a 20% discount from the ASU Bookstore. Please contact 480-965-4165 or matthew.krause@asu.edu