Josephine Pemberton facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Josephine Pemberton FRS
Pemberton in 2017
Alma mater	University of Oxford (BA) University of Reading (PhD)
Awards	Molecular Ecology Prize (2011) EMBO Member (2014) Fellow of the Royal Society (2017) Darwin-Wallace Medal (2018)
Scientific career
Fields	Evolutionary biology Molecular ecology
Institutions	University of Edinburgh University of Cambridge
Thesis	An investigation into the population genetics of British fallow deer (Dama dama L.) (1983)
Doctoral advisor	Robert H. Smith
Other academic advisors	Sam Berry

Josephine M. Pemberton FRS is a British evolutionary biologist. She is Chair of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh, where she conducts research in parentage analysis, pedigree reconstruction, inbreeding depression, parasite resistance, and quantitative trait locus (QTL) detection in natural populations. She has worked primarily on long-term studies of soay sheep on St Kilda, and red deer on the island of Rùm.

Education

Pemberton was educated at the University of Oxford (where she read Zoology) and the University of Reading where she was awarded a PhD in 1983 for research on the population genetics of fallow deer supervised by Robert H. Smith.

Research and career

After her PhD, she was a postdoctoral researcher at University College London and the University of Cambridge. This was followed by appointments as a BBSRC Advanced Fellow in Cambridge and Edinburgh, before being appointed a Lecturer in 1994 at the University of Edinburgh, where she has worked ever since. Her research has been funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

Awards and honours

Pemberton was awarded the Molecular Ecology Prize in 2011 and EMBO Membership in 2014. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2017.

She was awarded the Darwin-Wallace Medal in 2018. and was named Chair of Natural History in 2020.