Draft:Barbara Rosemary Grant

Barbara Rosemary Grant (born October 8, 1936) is an evolutionary biologist and professor emeritus at Princeton University. Grant is most known for her evolutionary research challenging Darwin’s theory of evolution as a slow, multigenerational process. She, alongside her research partner and husband Peter Grant, has been studying Darwin’s finches to understand the causes of adaptive radiation. In addition, Grant's early postdoctoral work combined with her work in the Galapagos Islands discovered how hybridization contributes to the formation of a new species under evolutionary conditions. Grant’s multidisciplinary work in ecology, genetics, and behavior has awarded her several accolades, including the Kyoto Prize and membership in the Royal Society of Canada & London, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. She also received the prestigious Royal Medal in Biology in 2017.

Early life
Grant grew up in Arnside, a village in northwest England, piquing her interest in the diversity of butterfly species there. In her new memoir, One Step Sideways, Three Steps Forward, Grant describes her parents as central figures in her early life. Grant appreciated scientific processes from an early age, nurtured by her mother’s love for nature and her physician father. Her intellectual determination combined with the scientific mentorship of her family shaped her decision to attend The University of Edinburgh in Scotland, when college was still a male-dominated field.

Education
Graduating with a degree in zoology in 1960 from The University of Edinburgh, Grant was exposed to genetics and evolution research. During her undergraduate career, she worked under geneticist Conrad Waddington and developed a novel method to determine cell surface proteins in different strains of soil amoebas. This exposure to genetics research led her to focus her dissertation on evolution among fish populations in different geographical locations. However, she delayed her doctoral project to pursue work.

After her undergraduate career, Grant worked as a biology associate professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She met Peter Grant, a doctoral student at the university, who shared similar research interests in evolution and ecology, leading to a lifelong research partnership and marriage. For the next decade, Grant as a research associate in Yale University, McGill University, and University of Michigan, worked alongside Peter Grant studying different bird species across islands, while he completed his own postdoctoral education.

In 1980, Grant pursued her own PhD in evolutionary biology at Uppsala University. Under the mentorship of Staffan Ulfstrand, she studied the determinations of physical variation in G. conirostris, a finch from Genovesa in Galapagos Islands. Her project revealed three key findings: 1) Natural selection was a byproduct of competition for resources 2) Species often created hybrids by reproducing with other closely related species. These hybrids could withstand the rigor of natural selection better than non-hybrids 3) Beak characteristics were genetically passed down, but the songs produced were taught.

After completing her doctoral work in 1985, Grant became a research scholar and lecturer for Princeton University, where she currently maintains a respected and established field of work.

Research & Significant Findings
During her gap years to pursue research before her PhD, Grant traveled to several islands to study the evolutionary patterns of birds. First, alongside Peter Grant, she traveled to Tres Marias Islands to determine how food competition affected the change in beak size for birds over generations. This first research project laid the foundation for the Grants’ most notable work in the Galapagos Islands.

Beginning in 1973, she and her partner traveled to Daphne Major, an island within Galapagos Islands, annually to track the behavior of Darwin’s finches. They sought to determine how the behavior of the finches has changed overtime. They noted character displacement of several finches annually, as they began to diverge due to resource competition. Beak characteristics, as observed in Rosemary Grant’s PhD work, began to change in as little as two years, while bird song was used as a tool for reproductive isolation. They found that evolution can be by physically observed and studied within a single generation, contrasting Darwin’s theory that evolution is always a slow, multigenerational process.

Building upon her earlier work, in 2018 Grant recently studied the extent to which reproductive isolation can be characterized quickly among three generations, known as rapid hybridization. She continues to use Darwin's finches, visiting the islands frequently, to inform her work.

Recent publications

 * 1) Lamichhaney, S., Han, F., Webster, M.T., Andersson, L., Grant, B.R. and Grant, P.R., (2018). Rapid hybrid speciation in Darwin’s finches. Science, 359:224-228.
 * 2) Grant, B. R., and P. R. Grant. (2017). Watching speciation in action. Science 355: 910-911.
 * 3) Lamichhaney, S., F. Han, J. Berglund, Wang, C., M. S. Almén, M. T. Webster, B. R. Grant, P. R. Grant, and L. Andersson. (2016). A beak size locus in Darwin’s finches facilitated character displacement during a drought. Science 352: 470-474.
 * 4) Lamichhaney, S., J. Berglund, M. S. Almén, K. Maqbool, M. Grabherr, A. Martinez-Barrio, M. Promerová, C-J. Rubin, C. Wang, N. Zamani, B. R. Grant, P. R. Grant, M. T. Webster, and L. Andersson. (2015). Evolution of Darwin’s finches and their beaks revealed by genome sequencing. Nature 518: 371-5.
 * 5) Grant, P. R., and B. R. Grant. (2014). Synergism of natural selection and introgression in the origin of a new species. American Naturalist 183: 671-681.
 * 6) Grant, B. R. and Grant, P. R. (2010). Songs of Darwin’s finches diverge when a new species enters the community: implications for speciation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 107: 20156-20163.
 * 7) Grant, B.R. and Grant, P.R. (2008). Fission and fusion of Darwin’s finch populations. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 363: 2821-2829.