Deborah Charlesworth


Deborah Charlesworth is a British evolutionary biologist.
Charlesworth received a PhD in genetics from Cambridge University in 1968, and did postdoctoral work at Cambridge, the University of Chicago, and Liverpool University. She taught at the University of Chicago from 1988–1997, leaving to take up a Professorial Research Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh. She is best known for her work on the evolution of genetic self-incompatibility in plants and is recognised as a leader in that field. According to the Web of Science she has published over 300 articles in peer-reviewed journals. These articles have been cited over 10,000 times and she has an h-index of 53. She has been married since 1967 to the British evolutionary biologist Brian Charlesworth.

Awards and honours

Charlesworth was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2001 and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2005
Charlesworth was awarded the Genetics Society Medal 2019. She was awarded
a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Society for the Study of evolution in January 2020.

Selected publications