Mohamed Noor is a Professor and Associate Chair of Biology at Duke University. His specialities include Evolution, Genetics and Genomics.
With a BS from the College of William and Mary (1992) and a PhD from University of Chicago (1996), together with a postdoctoral residency at Cornell University (1996-1998), he specialises in Drosophila evolution and in 2007 contributed to the publication on sequencing the genomes of twelve Drosophila species. The corresponding paper published in Nature that year has become the benchmark for the emerging field of comparative genomics.
Likewise, Noor was one of the first scientists to demonstrate by experiment speciation by "reinforcement", that is, as a result of natural selection mating preferences diverge against deleterious hybridization and reduce gene flow between species. He is also known for developing (along with others) a model wherein regions of restricted recombination, as by chromosomal inversions, facilitate the persistence of hybridizing species.
He was editor for the international journal Evolution, is or was associate editor for several other journals, and the author of close to 100 publications.
In 2008 he was awarded the Darwin-Wallace Medal.