Leverhulme Research Professor of Human Evolution at Cambridge University,
Robert A. Foley is director of the university’s Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies, which he co-founded (with Marta Mirazon Lahr) in 2001, and a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. His research is concerned with understanding the pattern of human evolution in terms of evolutionary processes. He has focused on evolutionary ecology, social evolution, community ecology, and biogeography. In recent years, he has attempted to integrate genetic, archaeological, and fossil evidence into a coherent model of geographical diversification, adaptive change, and behavioral evolution in recent human populations. Dr. Foley has worked extensively in Africa, and he currently directs a major collaborative study on the population history of Island Melanesia. Educated at Ardingly College, Sussex, and at Cambridge, where he studied at Peterhouse and took his B.A. and a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1980, he began his teaching career as a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Durham. He returned to Cambridge in 1986 as a university lecturer in biological anthropology and was named a reader in evolutionary anthropology in 1998. He served as director of the Duckworth Laboratory for ten years. Dr. Foley was appointed director of the Leverhulme Centre in 1991 and to his current professorship earlier this year. He has been a visiting professor at the University of New Mexico and the University of Cape Town. A fellow and former vice president of the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) and a fellow of the Linnaean Society, he has held the Lister Lectureship at the British Association for the Advancement of Sciences, a Fulbright Visiting Scholarship, and a Royal Society Senior Research Fellowship. Dr. Foley has delivered named lectures at the RAI, the University of São Paulo, the University of Uppsala, and the University of Wales, Abberystwyth. The author of more than 100 papers on human evolution and prehistory published in academic journals, he has edited two books and served as co-editor of four others, including (with Peter Donnelly) Genes, Fossils and Behaviour: An Integrated Approach to Human Evolution (2001). He is also the author of four other books, Off-Site Archaeology and Human Adaptation in Eastern Africa (1981), Another Unique Species: Patterns of Human Evolutionary Ecology (1987), Humans Before Humanity: An Evolutionary Perspective (1995), and, most recently, (with Roger Lewin) Principles of Human Evolution, which was published by Blackwell last year.
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