Walter M. Fitch

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Walter M. Fitch is professor of molecular evolution at the University of California, Irvine. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and is a Foreign Member of the Linnean Society (London). He is the co-founder of the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, together with Masatoshi Nei, and was the first president of the Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution.

Walter Fitch is noted for his pioneering work on reconstruction of phylogenies (evolutionary trees) from protein and DNA sequences. Among his achievements are the first major paper on distance matrix methods, which introduced the Fitch-Margoliash method which seeks the tree that best predicts a set of pairwise distances among species. He also developed the Fitch parsimony algorithm, which evaluates rapidly and exactly the minimum number of changes of state of a sequence on a given phylogeny.

[edit] Major papers

Fitch, W. M. and E. Margoliash. (1967). Construction of phylogenetic trees. Science 155: 279-284.
Fitch, W. M. (1971). Toward defining the course of evolution: minimum change for a specified tree topology. Systematic Zoology 20: 406-416