Jonathan B. Losos, born on December 7, 1961, in St. Louis County, Missouri, is a distinguished American evolutionary biologist and herpetologist. His educational journey in the field of biology began at Harvard University, where he earned his Bachelor’s degree in 1984, followed by a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989. His doctoral thesis focused on ecomorphological adaptation in the genus Anolis.

Losos started his academic career as a teaching assistant at Berkeley in 1987. After completing his Ph.D., he joined the University of California, Davis, in 1990 as one of the inaugural postdoctoral fellows at the Center for Population Biology. His academic path then led him to Washington University in St. Louis in 1992, where he progressed through the ranks from assistant professor to associate professor in 1997 and then to full professor in 2001.

Renowned for his work on convergent evolution and adaptive radiation, Losos has particularly focused on the evolutionary radiation of Anolis lizards in Central and South America and the Caribbean. His research has significantly contributed to the understanding of evolution in nature.

Losos served as the director of the Tyson Research Center at Washington University from 2000 to 2003 and again from 2004 to 2005. In 2006, he returned to Harvard University, assuming the roles of the Monique and Philip Lehner Professor for the Study of Latin America, Professor in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and Curator in Herpetology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. In 2018, he returned to Washington University as the William H. Danforth Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Biology and became the founding director of the Living Earth Collaborative, a partnership focusing on biodiversity.

Losos’s career has been marked by numerous accolades. These include the Dobzhansky Prize (1991), the David Starr Jordan Prize (1998), the Edward O. Wilson Naturalist Award (2009), the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal (2012), and the Sewall Wright Award (2019). He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2005), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2012), and the National Academy of Sciences (2018). In 2016, he was honored with the Distinguished Herpetologist award by The Herpetologists’ League. His contributions to evolutionary biology and herpetology have made him a respected and influential figure in these scientific communities.