The 2010 Bernard Cohen Memorial Lecture in Genetics

Sean Carroll is Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics and Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Wisconsin. Dr. Carroll's research has centered on those genes that control body patterns and play major roles in the evolution of animal diversity. He is the author of the new book Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species (2009), which was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award for non-fiction, The Making of the Fittest (2006), which won the Phi Beta Kappa 2007 Science Book Award, and Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo (2005), which was a finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Science and Technology). His first two books were the basis for, and Dr. Carroll was the scientific consulting producer of, a two-hour NOVA special broadcast in December 2009 on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s The Origin of Species.

Dr. Carroll is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, the Stephen Jay Gould Prize from the Society for the Study of Evolution, the Distinguished Service Award of the National Association of Biology Teachers, and the Viktor Hamburger Outstanding Educator Award from the Society for Developmental Biology.

Dr. Carroll earned his B.A. in Biology at Washington University in St. Louis, his Ph.D. in Immunology at Tufts Medical School, and carried out his postdoctoral research at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has also received an honorary Doctor of Science from the University of Minnesota.