Josephine M. Pemberton is a British evolutionary biologist. She is Chair of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh, where she conducts research in

parentage A parent is a caregiver of the offspring in their own species. In humans, a parent is the caretaker of a child (where "child" refers to offspring, not necessarily age). A ''biological parent'' is a person whose gamete resulted in a child, a male ...

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 The Soay sheep is a breed of domestic sheep (''Ovis aries'') descended from a population of feral sheep on the island of Soay in the St Kilda Archipelago, about from the Western Isles of Scotland. It is one of the Northern European short-tai ...

on St Kilda, and red deer on the island of

Rùm Rùm (), a Scottish Gaelic name often anglicised to Rum (), is one of the Small Isles of the Inner Hebrides, in the district of Lochaber, Scotland. For much of the 20th century the name became Rhum, a spelling invented by the former owner, Sir ...

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 Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation, is a non-departmental public body (NDPB), and is the largest UK public funder of non-medical bioscience. It predominantly funds scientific rese ...

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.The Darwin-Wallace Medal
The Linnean Society of London. and was named Chair of Natural History in 2020.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pemberton, Josephine M. Living people Fellows of the Royal Society Female Fellows of the Royal Society Members of the European Molecular Biology Organization Date of birth missing (living people) Year of birth missing (living people) Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh