Brian Charlesworth

Professor Brian Charlesworth FRS (born 29 April 1945) is a British evolutionary biologist and editor of Biology Letters.

Charlesworth gained a B.A. in natural sciences from Queen's College Cambridge, followed by a PhD in genetics from Cambridge in 1969. Postdoctoral work at the University of Chicago. University of Liverpool 1971-1974, University of Sussex under John Maynard Smith 1974-82. Returned to Chicago to be professor of ecology and evolution 1985-97. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1991 and won its Darwin Medal in 2000. Since 1997 he has been Royal Society Research Professor at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IEB), University of Edinburgh.

He is married to Deborah Charlesworth, who is also a biology professor and an FRS.

Charlesworth has worked extensively on understanding sequence evolution, using the fruit fly as a model species, and has also contributed theoretical work on ageing, the evolution of recombination and the evolution of sex chromosomes.