Adam Eyre-Walker facts for kids

Adam C. Eyre-Walker is a British scientist who studies how living things change over time at a very tiny level, like their DNA. This field is called evolutionary genetics. He is a Professor of Biology at the University of Sussex. He is known for helping us understand evolution by looking closely at DNA. He was also one of the first to use large databases of DNA information to learn about how the genetic material of living things has changed.

Early Life and Education

Adam Eyre-Walker went to the University of Nottingham for his first degree. He then earned his Ph.D. (a high-level university degree) from the University of Edinburgh in 1992. His Ph.D. research was about how DNA changes in mammals. His supervisor was William G. Hill. Adam Eyre-Walker started working at the University of Sussex in 1997.

What He Studies

Professor Eyre-Walker's main research looks at how DNA and the entire set of genetic instructions (called a genome) change over time. He studies how often these changes happen, what they look like, and what effects they have. He does this by using math and statistics to analyze DNA information.

He once said that a big puzzle in evolution is figuring out how much of it happens because living things adapt to their environment. He has spent much of his career trying to answer this question. He believes that adapting to surroundings plays a major role in how many species evolve.

How Scientists Work

In 2013, Adam Eyre-Walker and another scientist, Nina Stoletzki, published some interesting research. They suggested that scientists are not always the best at judging each other's work. They found that how many times a scientific paper is mentioned by other scientists might not be a perfect way to measure how good it is. They concluded that while scientists are probably the best people to judge science, they are "pretty bad at it."

Two years later, in 2015, Professor Eyre-Walker and his team, Isabelle Cook and Sam Grange, looked into the best size for science labs. They studied almost 400 different labs. They discovered that bigger labs tend to produce more scientific papers and have a greater impact in the science world.

Awards and Recognitions

Adam Eyre-Walker has received several important awards for his work. In 2002, he won the Balfour Prize from the Genetics Society. In 2012, he earned the President's award from the European Society for Evolutionary Biology. He was also chosen to be a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2020. Being a Fellow of the Royal Society is a very high honor for scientists in the United Kingdom.