Mohamed Noor

Who is Mohamed Noor?

Mohamed Noor is the Earl D. McLean Professor and Chair of the Biology Department at Duke University. His specialties include Evolution, Genetics and Genomics.

With a BS from the College of William and Mary and a PhD from University of Chicago, together with a postdoctoral residency at Cornell University, he specializes 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 a model wherein regions of restricted recombination, as by chromosomal inversions, facilitate the persistence of hybridizing species.

More recently, his research team has focused on understanding variation in recombination rate within and between species, and its impact on DNA sequence variation.

In 2008 he was awarded the Darwin-Wallace Medal from the Linnean Society of London.