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KEITH STEWART THOMSON

Keith Stewart Thomson became the American Philosophical Society’s Executive Officer on July 1, 2012.

Keith Stewart Thomson graduated from the University of Birmingham (UK) in 1960 and then moved to Harvard University, earning a Ph.D. in Biology in 1963. His dissertation was on the evolution of air-breathing at the transition between fishes and the first land animals.

He continued to study both fossil and living fishes when he returned to England as NATO post-doctoral fellow at University College London (1963-1965) before going to Yale University (1965-1987), first as a faculty member of the Biology Department, where he was also appointed Curator of Fishes in the Peabody Museum of Natural History and later as its Director, and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. At Yale his studies of ancient fishes inevitably drew him both to the “living fossil” lungfishes and the extraordinary living coelacanth. In 1966 he obtained for study the first fresh specimen of the coelacanth from the Comoro Islands (Living Fossil, Norton, 1991). His overall goal was to understand fossils in the same physiological, biomechanical, and ecological terms as we study living animals. In the process he published more than 200 papers on subjects ranging from the evolution of cell size and DNA content in lungfish, and intracranial mechanics in the coelacanth and its fossil relatives, to the origin of the tetrapod middle ear and the body shape and swimming mechanics of sharks. From an early interest in embryology, it was but a short step to study the roles that developmental processes play in evolution, and to writing Morphogenesis and Evolution (Oxford University Press, 1988). As an evolutionary biologist he naturally became interested in Charles Darwin and that led to a broader interest in the history of science (for example HMS Beagle, the Story of Darwin’s Ship, Norton, 1995).

He moved to Philadelphia as President and CEO of the Academy of Natural Sciences (1987-1995), which included heading a successful capital campaign for a new library building and a research laboratory on Chesapeake Bay.

In 1996 he was appointed University Distinguished Scientist-in-Residence at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where he introduced the first science curriculum and taught both biology and history of science.

In 1998 he was elected to be the first director (in modern times) of the Oxford University Museum, Professor of Natural History, and a Fellow of Kellogg College. At Oxford he was heavily involved in the creation of a new national program of funding for regional (i.e. not state-funded) museums.

After retiring in 2003 he returned to Philadelphia to write, and was based at the American Philosophical Society as Senior Research Fellow.

His recent books include: The Watch on the Heath (HarperCollins, published in the USA as Before Darwin by Yale University Press) and Fossils: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press), both in 2005; The Legacy of the Mastodon (Yale University Press, 2008); A Passion for Nature: Thomas Jefferson and Natural History (University of North Carolina Press for the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, 2008); and The Young Charles Darwin (Yale University Press, 2009). Due out in November 2012 is Jefferson’s Shadow: the Story of his Science (Yale University Press). He has a regular column, “Marginalia,” in the magazine American Scientist.