Stephen Hedges
Stephen Blair Hedges (known as S. Blair Hedges) is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Science and director of the Center for
Biodiversity at
Temple University where he researches the
tree of life and leads conservation efforts in Haiti and elsewhere. He co-founded
Haiti National Trust
Haiti National Trust is an International organization, international, Non-governmental organization, non-governmental, and Nonprofit organization, non-profit environmental organization dedicated to protecting the biodiversity of Haiti. The Haiti N ...
.
Career
Hedges has a
Bachelor of Science undergraduate degree from
George Mason University, and a
Masters and
Ph.D. in
Zoology
Zoology ()The pronunciation of zoology as is usually regarded as nonstandard, though it is not uncommon. is the branch of biology that studies the animal kingdom, including the structure, embryology, evolution, classification, habits, an ...
from the
University of Maryland
The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the University System of ...
, supervised by
Richard Highton.
Before he joined Temple University in 2014, he was a professor at
Penn State.
He is also a founding member of the NASA
Astrobiology Center. He has published over 300
peer-reviewed works including 10 books and monographs.
He was elected as a fellow of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2009 for "revealing connections between biological evolution and Earth history in diverse groups of organisms", and was awarded the 2011 Penn State Faculty Scholar Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Life and Health Sciences. A Cuban butterfly (''Leptodes hedgesi'' Schwartz & Johnson 1992), Cuban frog (''Eleutherodactylus blairhedgesi'' Estrada, Diaz, & Rodriguez 1997), and Cuban millipede (''Amphelictogon blairi'' Perez-Asso 1998) have been named in his honor.
Research
Hedges has studied the relationships and timing of major groups in the tree of life using genomic data.
This research has led to a number of discoveries including an early origin for the orders of placental mammals and modern birds, estimates of when
prokaryotes and
eukaryotes first colonized land and its relevance for the planet, and the
phylogenetic relationships of
reptiles and
insectivorous mammals. He has coined the word
timetree for a phylogenetic tree scaled to time, co-founded the TimeTree database for exploring the time-scale of the tree of life, and co-edited the book ''Timetree of Life''. Hedges and his team produced a spiral
tree of life in 2015 to visualize the relationships over time of 50,000 species, and discovered that diversification and
speciation are both relatively constant through time and among groups.
Hedges also has a field program in the
Caribbean
The Caribbean (, ) ( es, El Caribe; french: la Caraïbe; ht, Karayib; nl, De Caraïben) is a region of the Americas that consists of the Caribbean Sea, its islands (some surrounded by the Caribbean Sea and some bordering both the Caribbean ...
where he has studied the evolution and
biogeography of
amphibians and reptiles with genetic data and maintained a database of information on these species,
Caribherp. He discovered many new species in his work and has so far named 135 species of reptiles, amphibians, and butterflies. He also described three of the
smallest species of reptiles and amphibians, including the
Monte Iberia dwarf frog (''Eleutherodactylus iberia''), Jaragua gecko (''
Sphaerodactylus ariasae''), and the
Barbados threadsnake
The Barbados threadsnake (''Tetracheilostoma carlae'') is a species of threadsnake. It is the smallest known snake species. This member of the Leptotyphlopidae family is found on the Caribbean islands of Barbados and Anguilla.
Taxonomy and ety ...
(''Tetracheilostoma carlae''). Twelve articles in the ''
New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' have described his research.
Conservation
Work by Hedges and his team in Haiti has defined
hot spots of biodiversity leading to the establishment of three
national parks in Haiti. He also initiated a
captive breeding program to conserve ten
endangered species of frog at the
Philadelphia Zoo. Together with Haitian CEO
Philippe Bayard, he founded
Haiti National Trust
Haiti National Trust is an International organization, international, Non-governmental organization, non-governmental, and Nonprofit organization, non-profit environmental organization dedicated to protecting the biodiversity of Haiti. The Haiti N ...
, an environmental protection
NGO.
Personal life
Hedges is interested in
Renaissance art, which led him to conduct several scientific studies of early artwork, including the development of a method for dating old prints and a study on the historical biogeography of beetles based on the holes they bored in old books.
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hedges, S. Blair
Living people
Evolutionary biologists
Pennsylvania State University faculty
Temple University faculty
American herpetologists
George Mason University alumni
University of Maryland, College Park alumni
Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Year of birth missing (living people)
Place of birth missing (living people)