H. Frederik Nijhout

Biosketch

Fred Nijhout is the John Franklin Crowell Distinguished Professor in the Biology Department at Duke University. He was born in the Netherlands and grew up in Guatemala and Curaçao. He got his BS in Biology at the University of Notre Dame in 1970 and his PhD in Biology at Harvard University in 1974. He has been on the faculty at Duke University since 1977. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the recipient of the Founders’ Memorial Award of the Entomological Society of America, and the Kovalevsky Medal for his work in evolutionary developmental biology.

Research Interests

Much of my work is on the evolution and physiology of developmental mechanisms and I have a broad interest in understanding the higher-level control mechanisms in development. I work on the mechanisms by which animals assess their body size and use this information to stop growing when they reach a species-specific size. This work has revealed higher level feedback mechanisms that control the secretion of hormones involved in the regulation of growth. I also work on the control of polyphenisms: the ability of animals to develop discretely different phenotypes in response to environmental signals. These phenotypic differences are large and can be greater than those that distinguish species from each other, but do not involve any genetic differences. In all cases studies so far, these phenotypic differences arise from altered patterns of secretion of hormones that control alternative patterns of gene expression. I also work on the evolution and development of butterfly color patterns. This work centers on analyzing homologies among the various elements of the color pattern and how these develop and evolved to create the enormous diversity of patterns we see today.