Armand Marie Leroi (born 16 July 1964 in Wellington, New Zealand) is an evolutionary developmental biologist at Imperial College in London. A Dutch citizen, his youth was spent in New Zealand, South Africa and Canada. He was awarded a BSc. by Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada in 1989, and a Ph.D. by the University of California, Irvine in 1993. This was followed by postdoctoral work at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York using the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as an experimental organism.
In 2001, he was appointed lecturer at Imperial College London. He has written one book, entitled Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body[1] for which he was awarded the Guardian First Book Award in 2004. In 2004 he adapted his book into a television documentary series for Britain' Channel 4 entitled Human Mutants.
Leroi has presented two other TV documentary series for Channel 4: "Alien Worlds" in 2005 and "What Makes Us Human" in 2006. Despite his TV appearances, Leroi has expressed scepticism about the truthfulness of television creatives. In an email exchange with TV director Martin Durkin, concerning the latter's documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, Leroi wrote: "left to their own devices, TV producers simply cannot be trusted to tell the truth".[2]
He is also known as one of the first testers of the beneficial acclimation hypothesis. In 2005, Leroi published an article in the New York Times entitled "A Family Tree in Every Gene",[3] which argued for the usefulness of racial types in medical genetics.
It was found during the making of "What Makes Us Human" that his ASPM gene locus is heterozygous. That is to say, he has one copy of the recent variant and one copy of the old ASPM allele.
In January 2009 Leroi presented the BBC4 documentary What Darwin Didn't Know.
In January 2010 Leroi presented the BBC4 documentary Aristotle's Lagoon.