In addition to running a research lab, Dr. Edwards is the Curator of Ornithology at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. He studies the evolutionary history of birds.

Dr. Edwards did his undergraduate education at Harvard University — taking time off partway though to work at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. He completed his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley and his postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Florida in Gainesville. During his postdoc, he began studying the evolution of wild birds, and specifically, the evolution of genes that help prevent infections.

In 1994, he was hired by the University of Washington, where he also served as the Curator of Genetic Resources at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. (Fun fact: it’s the oldest public museum in Washington state!) He was recruited to Harvard in 2003 as a professor and to curate the ornithology collection at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. (Fun fact: it’s an awesome middle school field trip.)

Broadly speaking, Dr. Edwards’ lab studies the evolution of birds, combining the naturally occurring variation between species with large amounts of genetic information to draw conclusions about the molecular basis for these differences. One of the most interesting projects is looking at co-evolution of U.S. house finches and a bacterial pathogen, Mycoplasma gallisepticum. This bacteria is normally found in chickens, but spread rapidly through the house finch population of the United States, beginning in the 1940s. By comparing finch and bacteria genome sequences from different areas in the country, performing infection experiments in the lab, and studying museum specimens, Dr. Edwards hopes to reconstruct how the infection started (where it originated, how quickly it spread, etc.) and how both species have been changed by being engaged in an “arms race” with each other. So far, he has found evidence that both the finches and the bacteria have had periods of very rapid change and that viruses that infect finches were somehow involved as well.

Another major area of interest for Dr. Edwards is phylogeography — how ancestry of populations/evolutionary relationships (phylogeny) maps, literally, onto geography. Most studies that do this use DNA from the mitochondria (the part of the cell that makes ATP, which provides all the energy for a cell to do things), because:

1. the mitochondria have their own DNA, separate from the DNA in the nucleus,
2. mitochondria are inherited only from the mother, and
3. mitochondrial DNA evolves faster than nuclear DNA, which means that you can find informative differences, even between very similar subpopulations.

Dr. Edwards has been working to develop methods for looking at other parts of the genome that also evolve more quickly, for gathering information from many parts of the genome for many populations quickly, and for combining these large datasets into workable theories.