Name Stephen Hedges | ||
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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.
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Career
Hedges has a Bachelor of Science undergraduate degree from George Mason University, and a Masters and Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Maryland. 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 277 peer-reviewed works including 8 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.
Research
Hedges has studied the relationships and timing of major groups in the tree of life using gene and 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 planetary environment, and insights on the relationships of major groups of vertebrates. He has also coined the word timetree for a phylogenetic tree scaled to time, co-founded the TimeTree database for exploring the timescale 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 where he has studied the evolution and biogeography of amphibians and reptiles with genetic and genomic data and maintained a database of information on these species, CaribHerp. He discovered many new species in his work and has so far named 124 species of reptiles, amphibians, and butterflies [1] He also described three of the smallest species of reptiles and amphibians, including the Monte Iberia Dwarf Frog [2], Jaragua Gecko Sphaerodactylus ariasae, and the Barbados Threadsnake. His research has been described in 11 articles in the New York Times [3].
Conservation
Recent 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 endangered species at Philadelphia Zoo. Together with Haitian CEO Philippe Bayard, he founded Haiti National Trust, dedicated to save and protect the environment and biodiversity of Haiti for future generations.
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.