Identity area
Type of entity
Person
Authorized form of name
Doolittle, W. Ford
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Description area
Dates of existence
History
Dr. W. Ford Doolittle was born on November 30, 1941 in Urbana, Illinois. He obtained an undergraduate degree in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard in 1963 and his PhD from Stanford in 1967. In 1971 he moved to Canada, taking a position at Dalhousie University in Halifax. Since 1998 he has been a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and Director of its Program in Evolutionary Biology. His experimental research has focused variously on proving the endosymbiotic origin of plastids, developing the molecular biology of cyanobacteria and genetics of haloarchaea, probing origins of eukaryotes, and now exploring microbial environmental genomics. He also theorizes about such molecular evolutionary topics as ‘selfish DNA’, the origins of introns and molecular complexity, lateral gene transfer and the meaning of phylogeny. He is currently working on the function of junk DNA. Doolittle is also a photographer and attends the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. In 2013 he won the Herzberg medal and $1 million prize awarded for research and work in the natural sciences or engineering in Canada.