Peter and Rosemary Grant

Peter Raymond Grant and Barbara Rosemary Grant, a married couple, are both British evolutionary biologists at Princeton University; each holds the position of Emeritus Professor. They are noted for their work concerning Darwin's finches on the Galápagos Island named Daphne Major. The Grants have spent six months of the year each year since 1973 capturing, tagging, and taking blood samples of the finches on the island.

The Grants were the subject of the book The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), ISBN 0-679-40003-6, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1995.[1]

In 2003 the Grants were joint recipients of the Loye and Alden Miller Research Award. They won the 2005 Balzan Prize for Population Biology [2]. The Balzan Prize citation states:

"Peter and Rosemary Grant are distinguished for their remarkable long-term studies demonstrating evolution in action in Galápagos finches. They have demonstrated how very rapid changes in body and beak size in response to changes in the food supply are driven by natural selection. They have also elucidated the mechanisms by which new species arise and how genetic diversity is maintained in natural populations. The work of the Grants has had a seminal influence in the fields of population biology, evolution and ecology."

Peter was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1987 and Rosemary in 2007. In 2008 both Peter and Rosemary Grant were among the thirteen recipients of the Darwin-Wallace Medal, which is bestowed every 50 years by the Linnean Society of London. In 2009 they were recipients of the annual Kyoto Prize in basic sciences, an international award honoring significant contributions to the scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of mankind.

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