Alan Templeton

Raised in St. Charles, MO, Alan is a Charles Rebstock Professor Emeritus of Biology at WashU

Alan comes from a coalmining family, the first male in his family to pursue a career outside coalmining since 1606

Alan earned his BS at WashU, MS (Statistics) and PhD (Human Genetics) at University of Michigan

As an early postdoc, Alan studied ethnomusicology in Michigan, after which he pursued research on native Hawaiian Drosophila flies at Universities of Michigan and Hawaii

Alan returned to WashU as a faculty member in 1977

As a postdoc, Alan discovered a developmental syndrome in wild Hawaiian fly populations, which he named “abnormal abdomen”. Using this system, Alan established one of the most detailed mappings of a complex syndrome from gene to adaptive evolution

Alan has also used evolutionary approaches to identify genetic variants that are risk factors for human diseases, to infer recent human evolution, and to reject the hypothesis that humans are subdivided into biologically meaningful races

Currently, Alan works on projects to reintroduce collared lizards onto Ozark glades, and the Asiatic Wild Ass into the high Negev Desert in Southern Israel

A winner of many awards, Alan was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and given the honor of Fulbright-Israel Distinguished Chair as well as Charles Restock Professor of Biology here at WashU

Alan publications rank in the top 2.6% of Mendeley Rankings of Citations Through 2019 (excluding self-citations)

Alan converted to Judaism, identifying with the religion’s spirit of overcoming adversity and achieving freedom from slavery due to his own family’s history as coalminers in Scotland, where forced labor persisted in this industry into the 20^th century

For fun, Alan enjoys hiking, having done so on all 7 continents. He has also enjoyed caving, scuba diving and flying airplanes