Nick Barton

Professor Nicholas Hamilton Barton FRS FRSE is a British evolutionary biologist.

Better known as Nick Barton, he gained his PhD as a student of Godfrey Hewitt at the University of East Anglia in 1979. After a brief spell as lab demonstrator at the University of Cambridge, he became a Lecturer at Department of Genetics and Biometry, University College London, in 1982. Professor Barton is best known for his work on hybrid zones, mostly using the toad Bombina bombina as a study organism, and for his extending the mathematical machinery needed to investigate multilocus genetics, some of it in collaboration with Michael Turelli. Concrete research questions he has investigated include the role of epistasis, the evolution of sex, speciation, and what limits the rate of adaptation.

Barton moved to the University of Edinburgh in 1990, where he is said to have been instrumental in attracting Brian and Deborah Charlesworth, with whom he had previously collaborated, to the university, complementing the university's strong tradition in quantitative genetics with a population genetics side, and making the University of Edinburgh one of the foremost research institutions in genetics in the world.

Barton was made a professor in 1994. He was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in the same year, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1995. He received a Wolfson Merit Award in 2005.