Nick Barton facts for kids

Nicholas Hamilton Barton (born August 30, 1955) is a famous British scientist who studies how animals and plants change over many generations. This field of science is called evolutionary biology. He is known for his important research and for co-writing a popular textbook on evolution.

Education and Early Life

Barton was a very bright student. He attended Peterhouse, Cambridge, a famous college in England, and graduated with top honors in biological sciences in 1976.

He then went on to earn his PhD from the University of East Anglia in 1979. For his PhD project, he studied a type of grasshopper that lives in the Alps. His research focused on what happens when two slightly different groups of these grasshoppers meet and have offspring.

A Career Studying Evolution

After finishing his education, Barton began his career as a university teacher and researcher. He has worked at some of the top science institutions in Europe.

Key Research Topics

Professor Barton is famous for his work on "hybrid zones." These are areas in nature where two different species or subspecies meet and breed. He often studied a type of toad, Bombina bombina, to understand how genes are shared between these groups.

He also created new mathematical methods to study how many genes work together at once. This helped scientists understand complex traits in living things. Some of the big questions Barton's research has explored include:

• How do different genes interact with each other?
• Why did sexual reproduction evolve?
• How do new species form over time (speciation)?
• What are the limits to how quickly a species can adapt to a new environment?

University Positions

In 1982, Barton became a lecturer at University College London. He later moved to the University of Edinburgh in 1990. There, he helped build a world-class team of scientists studying genetics. This made the university a global leader in evolutionary research.

In 2008, Barton became the first professor at the new Institute of Science and Technology Austria, continuing his important work.

The Evolution Textbook

In 2007, Barton teamed up with four other scientists to write a textbook for university students called Evolution. The book was special because it combined traditional ideas about evolution with modern fields like molecular biology and genomics (the study of all of an organism's genes).

Awards and Honors

Throughout his career, Nicholas Barton has received many awards for his contributions to science. Being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1994 is one of the highest honors for a scientist in the United Kingdom.

Some of his other major awards include:

• Bicentenary Medal of the Linnean Society (1985)
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1995)
• Darwin Medal (2006) - An award for outstanding work in the field of evolution.
• Darwin–Wallace Medal (2008) - A special medal given for major advances in evolutionary biology.
• Erwin Schrödinger Prize (2013)
• International Member of the National Academy of Sciences (2024) - A top honor from the United States.

References