David Kingsley, Ph.D.

David Kingsley uses stickleback fish, mice, and humans to study the molecular mechanisms underlying evolution of new traits in vertebrates. He grew up in Iowa, and spent formative summers fishing on the Mississippi River and Lake Vermilion in Northern Minnesota. He moved east for his undergraduate studies, receiving a B.S. in Biology from Yale in 1981. Kingsley did his graduate research in somatic cell genetics of LDL receptor metabolism with Dr. Monty Krieger at MIT, where he received his Ph.D. in Biology in 1986. He then moved to Maryland to learn classical and modern mouse genetics with Drs. Neal Copeland and Nancy Jenkins at the NCI-Frederick Cancer Research Facility. Since 1991, he has been Assistant, Associate, and Full Professor in the Department of Developmental Biology at Stanford. Dr. Kingsley’s early positional cloning of classical mouse skeletal genes identified key signaling molecules that vertebrates use to control skeletal patterning, joint formation, and susceptibility to arthritis. In 1998, his laboratory also began innovative studies of the molecular basis of vertebrate evolution, using genetic crosses between recently evolved stickleback species in young postglacial lakes around the Northern Hemisphere. This pioneering research revealed simple genetic mechanisms underlying major morphological differences that have evolved repeatedly in nature. Strikingly, these studies also show that similar genetic mechanisms are often reused when similar traits evolve in many different populations and species. Principles from the fish research are now making it possible to identifying the molecular basis of classic phenotypes in many other vertebrates, including common human traits and diseases.Dr. Kingsley has received many awards for his innovative application of genetic methods to classic problems in biology, including a Lucille P. Markey Scholar Award (1989-1996), an NIH Merit Award for genetic analysis of Bone Morphogenetic Proteins (2002-2012), election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2005), the Edwin G. Conklin Medal for distinguished research in Developmental Biology (2009), election to the National Academy of Sciences (2011), and the Genetics Society of America medal for outstanding research in Genetics (2017).