Dr. Charles Aquadro (Chip) is Professor of Population Genetics, the Charles A. Alexander Professor of Biological Sciences, and Director of the Center for Comparative and Population Genomics at Cornell University. He obtained his Ph.D. in genetics from the University of Georgia, was a postdoc at the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences/NIH, and joined the faculty at Cornell University in 1985 where he is now a professor. He has served as President of the Society of Molecular Biology and Evolution, is an elected Fellow of the AAAS, is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for National Geographic Society's Genographic Project, was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the WGBH/NOVA TV series "Evolution," and has been a visiting scholar at Cambridge University (England, 1993) and Harvard University (2007). His research and teaching focuses on molecular population genetics, molecular evolution, and comparative genomics. While Drosophila is his primary research system, recent work has also involved yeast, humans, and plants. At Cornell, he teaches a university-wide course to nonmajors on personal genomics and medicine, and a major's course in population genetics.
