Frontiers Forum > Speakers 2020 > Harris Lewin | University of California, Davis

Harris Lewin | University of California, Davis

Harris A. Lewin is the Robert and Rosabel Osborne Endowed Chair and Distinguished Professor of Evolution and Ecology and at the University of California, Davis where he also holds a joint appointment in the School of Veterinary Medicine and is a Fellow of the John Muir Institute for the Environment. His current research interest is in mammalian genome evolution as it relates to adaptation, speciation, and the origins of cancer, and he serves as the Chair of the Earth BioGenome Project Working Group.

From 2011-2016, Harris served as the UC Davis Vice Chancellor for Research. Prior to that he spent 27 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he held the E.W. and J.M. Gutgsell Endowed Professorship in Immunogenetics, with a primary appointment in the Department of Animal Sciences and was a member of the Center for Advanced Study. Harris served as Director of the University of Illinois Biotechnology Center, Founding Director of the W.M. Keck Center for Comparative and Functional Genomics, and Founding Director of the Institute for Genomic Biology. In 2004, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and in 2007 he was elected as a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry. In 2011 Harris was awarded the Wolf Prize in Agriculture. In 2013 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Animal Science from Cornell University, a Master of Science in Animal Breeding and Genetics from Cornell University, and a PhD in Immunology from the University of California, Davis.